What Can Genetics Tell Us About Education?

Dr Emily Smith-Woolley from King's College London is a behavioural geneticist from the group of Robert Plomin at the KCL. They work with the data from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) to separate genetic and environmental effects on children's outcomes. They've just published a paper in the Science of Learning on the effects of school type on exam performance arguing that superior results of children in selective schools come from the selection of more academically able children rather than school performance (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-018-0019-8). Emily will present these results as well as a more general framework of how behavioural geneticists study education.