A Classical Twin Design model of educational attainment in the TwinLife sample estimates shared environmental influence at 43% and additive genetic influence at 34%¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2023 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? In the same German families, a CTD ACE model produced A = 34% (95% CIs: 23–47%), C = 43% (31–53%), and E = 23% (20–26%) for educational attainment. → Wolfram 2023

Evidence¶

Wolfram 2023¶

Wolfram, T. & Morris, D. (2023). Conventional twin studies overestimate the environmental differences between families relevant to educational attainment. npj Science of Learning 8, 24. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-023-00173-y

q2 · i? · associational · r2

Model-fitting of a CTD ACE structural equation model to twin-only data from the TwinLife 1990–1993 cohort, with educational attainment corrected for age and gender. The article reports "A = 34% (95% CIs: 23 –47%), C = 43% (31–53%), and E = 23% (20 –26%)".

"This produced estimates of: A = 34% (95% CIs: 23 –47%), C = 43% (31–53%), and E = 23% (20 –26%)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Adjusting published twin-study ACE estimates for assortative mating raises mean heritability by about 17 points and lowers shared environmental estimates by about 16 points — related
• Twin-specific shared environments account for a substantial portion of CTD shared-environment estimates for educational attainment and cannot be interpreted as between-family environmental differences — related
• Under phenotypic assortment NTFD models, parental education shows no environmental effect on offspring educational attainment once genetic influences are accounted for — related
• The best-fitting NTFD model estimates heritability of educational attainment at 51% and total shared environmental influence at 26%, disaggregated into twin-specific (16%) and sibling-shared (10%) components — related
• Dizygotic twin correlations for educational attainment are consistently higher than non-twin sibling correlations across countries, suggesting twin-specific shared environments are a general phenomenon — related
• Educational achievement is highly heritable, and the common environmental variance is attributable to SES effects — related
• Genetic and environmental variance components of educational achievement decrease with increasing parental SES — related