New research shows that measures used to judge the effectiveness of schools are partly influenced by genetic factors in students

The assumption behind measures of school effectiveness is that changes in student performance over time must be explained by the quality of the school environment. So the quality of education can be measured by the amount of improvement over time. However, using data on school performance over time from 4000 pairs of twins researchers have shown that this and other approaches to assessing school quality do not measure the school environment alone. These measures are also substantially influenced by genetic factors that children bring to the classroom. These findings do not mean that educational quality is unimportant. However, these results do suggest that children bring characteristics to the classroom that influence how well they will take advantage of the quality. Consider a classroom full of students being taught by the same teacher. Some children will improve more than other children, even though their educational experience at school is the same. Future research will aim to identify which characteristics in the child allow them to gain more from their educational experience. High on the list of candidates are motivation, persistence, and self-control, all of which are already known to show genetic and environmental influences, and are likely to affect school learning. This genetic perspective on education suggests moving away from thinking of children as passive recipients of knowledge in education to an active view of learning in which children select, modify and create their own education in part on the basis of their genetic propensities.