title: Heritability, family, school and academic achievement in adolescence.
abstract: We demonstrate how genetically informed designs can be applied to administrative exam data to study academic achievement. ACE mixture latent class models have been used with Year 6 and 9 exam data for seven cohorts of Polish students which include 24,285 pairs of twins. Depending on a learning domain and classroom environment history, from 58% to 88% of variance in exam results is attributable to heritability, up to 34% to shared environment and from 8% to 15% depends on unique events in students' lives. Moreover, between 54% and 66% of variance in students' learning gains made between Years 6 and 9 is explained by heritability. The unique environment accounts for between 34% and 46% of that variance. However, we find no classroom effects on student progress made between Years 6 and 9. We situate this finding against the view that classroom peer groups and teachers matter for adolescent learning.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Nowy Świat 72, 00-330 Warsaw, Poland. Electronic address: artur.pokropek@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Artur
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pokropek
authors.affiliation: School of Sociology, Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia. Electronic address: joanna.sikora@anu.edu.au.
authors.forename: Joanna
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sikora
mesh_terms: D000124:Achievement; D000293:Adolescent; D015331:Cohort Studies; D004521:Educational Measurement; D004522:Educational Status; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D055614:Genetic Phenomena; D005823:Genetics; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D010379:Peer Group; D011044:Poland; D000070777:School Teachers; D012574:Schools; D012931:Social Environment; D013334:Students; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014427:Twins
keywords: Administrative exam data; Genetically informed designs; Heritability in education; Latent-class modeling; Twin studies