“Genetic Link between Family Socioeconomic Status and Children’s Educational Achievement Estimated from Genome-Wide SNPs”, 2015-03-10 (; backlinks; similar):
One of the best predictors of children’s educational achievement is their family’s socioeconomic status (SES), but the degree to which this association is genetically mediated remains unclear.
For 3000 UK-representative unrelated children we found that genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms could explain a third of the variance of scores on an age-16 UK national examination of educational achievement and half of the correlation between their scores and family SES. Moreover, genome-wide polygenic scores based on a previously published genome-wide association meta-analysis of total number of years in education accounted for ~3.0% variance in educational achievement and ~2.5% in family SES.
This study provides the first molecular evidence for substantial genetic influence on differences in children’s educational achievement and its association with family SES.