Abstract
There are concerns that ability tracking at a young age increases unequal opportunities for children of different socioeconomic background to develop their potential. To disentangle family influence and potential ability, we applied moderation models to twin data on secondary educational track level from the Netherlands Twin Register (N = 8847). Delaying tracking to a later age is associated with a lower shared environmental influence and a larger genetic influence on track level in adolescence. This is in line with the idea that delaying tracking improves equality of opportunity. Our results further suggest that this is mostly because delaying tracking reduces the indirect influence of family background on track level via the test performance of students. Importantly, delaying tracking improves the realization of genetic potential especially among students with low test scores, while it lowers shared environmental influence on track level for students of all test performance levels.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 6 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-13 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | NPJ Science of learning |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 4 May 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are grateful to the twin families and the teachers for their participation. We greatly benefitted from the OpenMx forum and online code examples, especially those of Hermine Maes and Julia Kutschke. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2019 Sibling Models in Intergenerational Transmission Research Workshop at Nuffield College and the 2019 ECSR Conference in Lausanne. We thank the audiences for their useful suggestions. This research was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research ‘Towards Equal Educational Opportunities: The Complex Interaction between Genes, Families, and Schools’ (NWO Veni: 451-17-030 [Knigge]); ‘Twin-family study of individual differences in school achievement’ (NWO: 056-32-010); ‘Longitudinal data collection from teachers of Dutch twins and their siblings’ (NWO: 481-08-011); ‘Netherlands Twin Registry Repository’ (NWO Groot: 480-15-001/674).
Funding Information:
We are grateful to the twin families and the teachers for their participation. We greatly benefitted from the OpenMx forum and online code examples, especially those of Hermine Maes and Julia Kutschke. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2019 Sibling Models in Intergenerational Transmission Research Workshop at Nuffield College and the 2019 ECSR Conference in Lausanne. We thank the audiences for their useful suggestions. This research was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research ‘Towards Equal Educational Opportunities: The Complex Interaction between Genes, Families, and Schools’ (NWO Veni: 451-17-030 [Knigge]); ‘Twin-family study of individual differences in school achievement’ (NWO: 056-32-010); ‘Longitudinal data collection from teachers of Dutch twins and their siblings’ (NWO: 481-08-011); ‘Netherlands Twin Registry Repository’ (NWO Groot: 480-15-001/674).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).
