ArticleNPJ science of learning2023
Conventional twin studies overestimate the environmental differences between families relevant to educational attainment.
Article in NPJ science of learning, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- International Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Assortative Mating for Educational Attainment.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorPooled it
- Student-teacher relationships as a mediator of children's education-linked genetics: results from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Changes in heritability and shared environmentality of educational attainment across twentieth-century Norway.Nature communications · 2026Article
- No Argument with Biology? The Effects of Genetic Explanations for Socioeconomic Outcomes on American and Swedish Citizens' Attitudes Towards Government Intervention.Behavior genetics · 2026Article
- Longitudinal associations between cognitive ability and socioeconomic status are partially genetic in nature.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- 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
- Understanding indirect assortative mating and its intergenerational consequences for educational attainment.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Raising the Floor? Genetic Influences on Educational Attainment Through the Lens of the Evolving Swedish Welfare State.Behavior genetics · 2025Article
- Social Background Effects on Educational Outcomes-New Insights from Modern Genetic Science.Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie · 2024Article
- Testing for SES differences in the responsiveness of educational expectations in a twin design.PloS one · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Estimates of shared environmental influence on educational attainment (EA) using the Classical Twin Design (CTD) have been enlisted as genetically sensitive measures of unequal opportunity. However, key assumptions of the CTD appear violated for EA. In this study we compared CTD estimates of shared environmental influence on EA with estimates from a Nuclear Twin and Family Design (NTFD) in the same 982 German families. Our CTD model estimated shared environmental influence at 43%. After accounting for assortative mating, our best fitting NTFD model estimated shared environmental influence at 26%, disaggregating this into twin-specific shared environments (16%) and environmental influences shared by all siblings (10%). Only the sibling shared environment captures environmental influences that reliably differ between families, suggesting the CTD substantially overestimates between-family differences in educational opportunity. Moreover, parental education was found to have no environmental effect on offspring education once genetic influences were accounted for.
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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.