Purpose: We examined whether the relations between home literacy environment (HLE), children's independent reading, and emergent literacy and reading skills are confounded by parents' reading skills (a genetic proxy). Method: One hundred eighty-nine Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 74.26 months, 40% female) were followed from kindergarten to…

Child maltreatment is a significant problem in North America. Maltreatment comes in many forms, such as neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, abandonment, and traumatic world events. The maltreatment affects children's neurobiological development, and thus, potentially their future quality of social and psychological health. This article gives a…

Despite the importance of self-control for well-being and adjustment, its development from early childhood to early adolescence has been relatively understudied. We addressed the development of mother-reported self-control in what is likely the largest and longest longitudinal twin study of the topic to this day (N = 1889 individual children with…

In the first 20 years of the 21st century, research on morality grew exponentially in social sciences and related fields. A corresponding upsurge in the field of moral education has not been observed. It appears that there is a widening gap between the science of morality and the field of moral education, which once were closely interconnected…

This study seeks to argue that the embodied approach to cognition provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to revise some of our educational practices. Any educational activity presupposes some underlying assumption about human nature. Current dominant mainstream educational set-up is based upon disembodied accounts of the human mind, which…

Behavioural genetics regards intelligence and educational attainment as highly heritable (genetically influenced) and polygenic (influenced by many genes) traits. Researchers in the field have moved beyond identifying whether and how much genes influence a given outcome to trying to pinpoint the genetic markers that help predict them. In more…

Historically, the potential of a person has been perceived as fixed and primarily inherited, thus, different from achievement. Current thinking broadens our view of human potential, not as a fixed capacity, but as malleable and incremental, depending on multiple factors, exogenous as well as endogenous, facilitative or inhibitive. This conception…

This paper examines the genetic ("nature") and environmental ("nurture") influences on why students vary in their reading skills. We review core findings from the field of modern behavioral genetics, a discipline that studies the interplay of genetic and environmental influences, on reading science. Additionally, we provide an…

Mental disorders are disorders of the cognitive, emotional or behavioral condition of an individual. They can have several origins and are usually associated with expressive anguish and difficulty in various aspects of life, including school education. Mental disorders are accompanied by social stigmas which may be linked to the belief in genetic…

Socialization is the process of learning to be a human being that is born with the potential to be human. In this process, the person learns the basic values and norms of the society in which he lives, as well as the skills necessary to sustain his life. This learning takes place through parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, peers, teachers,…

School genetics is changing. Nowadays, students are more likely to be introduced to the idea that many characteristics of organisms, including those of humans, are not determined by the actions of just one or two genes but result from interactions between the products of many genes and the environments of each organism. This article asks whether…

In this article, we engage with a question that has occupied the professional, policy, and popular discourse on education and socialization: are a child's development potential and outcomes contingent on innate abilities ("nature") or environment ("nurture") (Plomin, DeFries, & Fulker, 1988; Stiles, 2011; Tabery, 2014;…

Gene technologies are developing at a high speed. Yet, the understandings and ethical conceptions about these developments are not sufficiently scrutinized and reflected. Our qualitative analysis examines everyday myths of younger generations about genome editing; these contribute to a complex fabric of rationally and intuitively justified…

This research examines how the human genome and SES jointly and interactively shape verbal ability among youth in the U.S. The youth are aged 12-18 when the study starts. The research draws on findings from the latest GWAS as well as a rich set of longitudinal SES measures at individual, family and neighborhood levels from Add Health (N = 7194).…

In this article, it is argued that it makes sense to define and distinguish three levels of human intelligence: intelligence as genotypical potential, intelligence as actualised in environmental interaction, and intelligence as measured by tests (IQ). This raises the questions of what is meant by the term "intelligence as potential", and…