Genome-wide association studies and polygenic scores link genetic variants to individual differences in educational attainment, with small per-SNP but increasing aggregate effects¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · review r2–r3 · q2–q3 · i0 negligible
Currency · newest study 2018 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? A GWAS with 1.1 million individuals identified 1271 independent SNPs associated with educational attainment; a polygenic prediction score from these SNPs explained 11–13% of variance in educational attainment and 7–10% of variance in cognitive performance in independent samples. → H. Moriah Sokolowski and Daniel Ansari 2018 q2 i0 Individual SNPs from early educational-attainment GWAS have very small effects, with a coefficient of determination of approximately 0.02%, equal to about one month of schooling per allele. → H. Moriah Sokolowski and Daniel Ansari 2018 (2)

Evidence¶

H. Moriah Sokolowski and Daniel Ansari 2018¶

H. Moriah Sokolowski and Daniel Ansari. (2018). Understanding the effects of education through the lens of biology. npj Science of Learning 3:17. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-018-0032-y

q3 · i? · review · r3

GWAS of 1.1 million individuals identified 1271 independent SNPs for educational attainment; the derived polygenic score explained "11– 13% of the variance in educational attainment" and 7–10% of cognitive-performance variance in independent samples. No standardized effect size is printed.

"Most recently, a GWAS study with 1.1 million individuals identi fied 1271 independent SNPs associated with educational attainment. 88 These SNPS were used to compute a polygenic prediction score that explained 11– 13% of the variance in educational attainment and 7 – 10% of the variance in cognitive performance in independent samples."

H. Moriah Sokolowski and Daniel Ansari 2018 (2)¶

H. Moriah Sokolowski and Daniel Ansari. (2018). Understanding the effects of education through the lens of biology. npj Science of Learning 3:17. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-018-0032-y

q2 · i0 · review · r2

The review reports that the three SNPs from the original years-of-education GWAS have "coef ficient of determination R(2) ≈0.02%", about 1 month of schooling per allele, replicated in a study with a threefold larger sample; this per-SNP effect is negligible.

"Critically, the estimated effects sizes of these three SNPs are small (coef ficient of determination R(2) ≈0.02%; this equals approximately 1 month of schooling per allele)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• The number of genome-wide significant loci associated with educational attainment increases with GWAS discovery sample size — related
• A polygenic score for educational attainment explains about 15% of individual differences in out-of-sample prediction among people of European descent, with a correlation of approximately 0.4 with outcomes — related
• Polygenic score predictive power for educational attainment increases with discovery sample size and is projected to approach the SNP heritability bound — related
• Polygenic risk scores for educational attainment and cognitive performance show the most consistent associations with language traits, and these associations are stronger for English than Chinese literacy phenotypes — related