ArticleeLife2020
Can education be personalised using pupils' genetic data?
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond years of schooling: Genetic associations across educational milestones in two Norwegian cohorts.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- The Economics and Econometrics of Gene-Environment Interplay.The Review of economic studies · 2026Article
- Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) summary education attainment values in the offspring generation.Wellcome open research · 2026Article
- Large language models predict cognition and education close to or better than genomics or expert assessment.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Principles and Policy Recommendations for Comprehensive Genetic Data Governance.Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society · 2025Article
- Implications of the genomic revolution for education research and policy.British educational research journal · 2024Article
- Infrastructuring Educational Genomics: Associations, Architectures, and Apparatuses.Postdigital science and education · 2024Article
- Article
- Detecting genetic heterogeneities in response to trauma: The case of 9/11.SSM. Mental health · 2022Article
- Review
- Challenging the utility of polygenic scores for social science: Environmental confounding, downward causation, and unknown biology.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2022Article
- Investigating how the accuracy of teacher expectations of pupil performance relate to socioeconomic and genetic factors.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Bench Research Informed by GWAS Results.Cells · 2021Review
- The practical utility of genetic screening in school settings.NPJ science of learning · 2021Article
- Educational attainment impacts drinking behaviors and risk for alcohol dependence: results from a two-sample Mendelian randomization study with ~780,000 participants.Molecular psychiatry · 2021Article
- Inclusion of genetic variants in an ensemble of gradient boosting decision trees does not improve the prediction of citalopram treatment response.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- "Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated": Behavior Genetics in the Postgenomic Era.Annual review of psychology · 2021Review
- Pygmalion in the Genes? On the potentially negative impacts of polygenic scores for educational attainment.Social psychology of education : an international journal · 2021Article
- Polygenic Scores in Developmental Psychology: Invite Genetics In, Leave Biodeterminism Behind.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2020Article
- Educational attainment reduces the risk of suicide attempt among individuals with and without psychiatric disorders independent of cognition: a bidirectional and multivariable Mendelian randomization study with more than 815,000 participants.Translational psychiatry · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The increasing predictive power of polygenic scores for education has led to their promotion by some as a potential tool for genetically informed policy. How accurately polygenic scores predict an individual pupil's educational performance conditional on other phenotypic data is however not well understood. Using data from a UK cohort study with data linkage to national schooling records, we investigated how accurately polygenic scores for education predicted pupils' test score achievement. We also assessed the performance of polygenic scores over and above phenotypic data that are available to schools. Across our sample, there was high overlap between the polygenic score and achievement distributions, leading to poor predictive accuracy at the individual level. Prediction of educational outcomes from polygenic scores were inferior to those from parental socioeconomic factors. Conditional on prior achievement, polygenic scores failed to accurately predict later achievement. Our results suggest that while polygenic scores can be informative for identifying group level differences, they currently have limited use for accurately predicting individual educational performance or for personalised education.
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Registered trials
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.