ERIC Number: EJ1432129
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-2056-7936
Gene-Environment Interaction Analysis of School Quality and Educational Inequality
npj Science of Learning, v9 Article 14 2024
We study to what extent schools increase or decrease environmental and genetic influences on educational performance. Building on behavioral genetics literature on gene-environment interactions and sociological literature on the compensating and amplifying effects of schools on inequality, we investigate whether the role of genes and the shared environment is larger or smaller in higher-quality school environments. We apply twin models to Dutch administrative data on the educational performance of 18,384 same-sex and 11,050 opposite-sex twin pairs, enriched with data on the quality of primary schools. Our results show that school quality does not moderate genetic and shared-environmental influences on educational performance once the moderation by SES is considered. We find a gene-environment interplay for school SES: genetic variance decreases with increasing school SES. This school SES effect partly reflects parental SES influences. Yet, parental SES does not account for all the school SES moderation, suggesting that school-based processes play a role too.
Descriptors: Genetics, Environmental Influences, Interaction, Educational Quality, Equal Education, Academic Achievement, Educational Environment, Foreign Countries, Elementary Schools, Socioeconomic Status, Parent Influence, School Role
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Netherlands
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A