Gene-environment interaction analysis of school quality and educational inequality

Kim Stienstra; Antonie Knigge; Ineke Maas

doi:10.1038/s41539-024-00225-x

Gene-environment interaction analysis of school quality and educational inequality

Kim Stienstra^*
, Antonie Knigge
, Ineke Maas

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

We study to what extent schools increase or decrease environmental and genetic influences on educational performance. Building on behavioral genetics literature on gene-environment interactions and sociological literature on the compensating and amplifying effects of schools on inequality, we investigate whether the role of genes and the shared environment is larger or smaller in higher-quality school environments. We apply twin models to Dutch administrative data on the educational performance of 18,384 same-sex and 11,050 opposite-sex twin pairs, enriched with data on the quality of primary schools. Our results show that school quality does not moderate genetic and shared-environmental influences on educational performance once the moderation by SES is considered. We find a gene-environment interplay for school SES: genetic variance decreases with increasing school SES. This school SES effect partly reflects parental SES influences. Yet, parental SES does not account for all the school SES moderation, suggesting that school-based processes play a role too.

Original language	English
Article number	14
Pages (from-to)	1-14
Number of pages	14
Journal	npj Science of learning
Volume	9
Early online date	1 Mar 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-024-00225-x
Publication status	Published - 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.

Funding

We thank Esmee Bosma for her help with the data cleaning of the school quality indicators. We have adapted the Mplus code of Figlio et al. (2017) and are thankful to them for sharing their code. Prior versions of this work were presented at the ICS forum day (2020), the departmental Migration and Social Stratification seminar (2020), the RC28 spring meeting (2021), Dag van de Sociologie (2021), and the Genes, Social Mobility, and the Inequalities across the Life-Course conference of the ifo Institute (2021). We thank all the participants for their valuable comments. This research was supported by the Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [NWO]) research talent grant for the project ‘Quality and inequality: The compensatory and multiplicative effects of school quality’ (NWO: 406-18-557, awarded to K.S., A.K., and I.M.), a Veni grant for the project ‘Towards equal educational opportunities: The complex interaction between genes, families, and schools’ (NWO: 451-17-030, awarded to A.K.), and a CBS ODISSEI Microdata Access Grant for the project ‘Gene-environment interplay in education: The impact of school quality and tracking’ (awarded to A.K., K.S., and I.M.).

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Gene-environment interaction analysis of school quality and educational inequality

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