ArticlePsychological science2013
Literacy and numeracy are more heritable than intelligence in primary school.
Article in Psychological science, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evocative effects of children's education-associated genetics on maternal parenting: results from the Norwegian mother, father and child cohort study.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Exploring the genetic prediction of academic underachievement and overachievement.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- Genetic knowledge and attitudes towards genetic testing among final-year medical students at a public university in Ecuador.Frontiers in medicine · 2024Article
- Estimating effects of parents' cognitive and non-cognitive skills on offspring education using polygenic scores.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Early manifestations of intellectual performance: Evidence that genetic effects on later academic test performance are mediated through verbal performance in early childhood.Child development · 2022Article
- The Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) Framework for Understanding Musicality-Language Links Across the Lifespan.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2022Review
- Genetic influence on cognitive development between childhood and adulthood.Molecular psychiatry · 2021Article
- The intergenerational transmission of mathematics achievement in middle childhood: A prospective adoption design.Developmental science · 2020Article
- Maths attitudes, school affect and teacher characteristics as predictors of maths attainment trajectories in primary and secondary education.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Intergenerational Transmission of Education and ADHD: Effects of Parental Genotypes.Behavior genetics · 2020Article
- Predictors of mathematical attainment trajectories across the primary-to-secondary education transition: parental factors and the home environment.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- The Intergenerational Transmission of Early Educational Advantages: New Results Based on an Adoption Design.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2020Article
- Internalizing symptoms and working memory as predictors of mathematical attainment trajectories across the primary-secondary education transition.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Cognitive ability and education: How behavioural genetic research has advanced our knowledge and understanding of their association.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2020Review
- Longitudinal Effects of the Home Learning Environment and Parental Difficulties on Reading and Math Development Across Grades 1-9.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Comparing Within- and Between-Family Polygenic Score Prediction.American journal of human genetics · 2019Article
- New literacy challenge for the twenty-first century: genetic knowledge is poor even among well educated.Journal of community genetics · 2019Article
- Genetics and Learning: How the Genes Influence Educational Attainment.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Review
- Socioeconomic status and genetic influences on cognitive development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Reading self-perceived ability, enjoyment and achievement: A genetically informative study of their reciprocal links over time.Developmental psychology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Because literacy and numeracy are the focus of teaching in schools, whereas general cognitive ability (g, intelligence) is not, it would be reasonable to expect that literacy and numeracy are less heritable than g. Here, we directly compare heritabilities of multiple measures of literacy, numeracy, and g in a United Kingdom sample of 7,500 pairs of twins assessed longitudinally at ages 7, 9, and 12. We show that differences between children are significantly and substantially more heritable for literacy and numeracy than for g at ages 7 and 9, but not 12. We suggest that the reason for this counterintuitive result is that universal education in the early school years reduces environmental disparities so that individual differences that remain are to a greater extent due to genetic differences. In contrast, the heritability of g increases during development as individuals select and create their own environments correlated with their genetic propensities.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.