'The Most Significant Influence on Our Academic Achievement Is Our Genes'

[Keith Maitland]

What makes some children smarter than others? No one wants to be to told that their child is not clever. To be told that to a large extent this is down to their genes can just make matters worse. But according to my guest today leading psychologist professor Robert Plomin the evidence on the inheritance of intelligence is clear. Much as we like to think that good parenting and good teachers make all the difference, they do not. The most significant influence on academic achievement is written in our children's DNA.

Born and raised in Chicago, Robert came to the UK in 1994. A year later he launched the largest longitudinal twin study in the world know as the TEDS study. When all twins had reached age 16 he showed that GCSE grades are more nature than nurture.

James Interviewer: So Robert presumably the twins all 10,000 pairs of them have now done their A-levels exams. What is the latest news?

Robert Plomin: We are very excited about this because no one studied A-levels before and only half of the students take A-levels. So I really didn't know how the results would come out but in terms of the grades themselves after two years of A-levels as much as we found in previous years that is most of the differences in children's performance can be attributed to DNA differences between them.

James: It's rather alarming in fact isn't it?

Robert Plomin: Absolutely.

James: That all the work we can do in guiding the children giving them advice and sending them to the right school and it's already there imprinted in their genes.

Robert Plomin: Yes... In the past I really hated to pit nature versus nurture because they are both important. But when you have people so worried about say differences between schools and league tables, that at most accounts for 20 percent of the differences between children and school achievement. Genetics accounts for well over half, maybe two-thirds of the differences. So at some point I think you have to say we are not talking about little effects here. We are talking about by far the biggest predictor of children's performance. And I think it's important for parents to get that message. And it's not to say you don't do anything. You give your kids the best possible shot at doing what they do and doing it well. But if parents think that their children are a blob of clay that they mold to be the way they want them to be, it's important for them to get this message.

Full interview here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06j1qts

[Nearly Sane]

Be good if you learned to quote properly? Or was Plomin actually your guest on a show?

[Udayana]

Of-course that was yesterdays excellent Life Scientific with Jim Al-Khaili interviewing Plomin. Great discussion on the programme.  It seems irrefutable that genetics plays a vital part in intelligence, although most details still remain to be uncovered. Eventually we may have the capability of engineering intelligence.

How do we use this knowledge? Should we change our educational or other systems to take inherited intelligence into account?  Or are they already working as we would want them to?

[Outrider]

This single study comes in as suggesting around a 66-33 split in favour of nature - other studies over time have come in anywhere between 50-50 and 80-20 in favour of nature.

It seems likely that nature is more of an influence that nurture, but I'd like to see someone do a meta-analysis of all the studies.

O.

[Rhiannon]

At least it should mean an end to shit like parents sending their kids to Kumon maths in the belief it will make a child into a genius.

[Outrider]

At least it should mean an end to shit like parents sending their kids to Kumon maths in the belief it will make a child into a genius.

Not really - what this study shows is that the baseline intelligence - and therefore capacity -  is more genetic than taught, but if you don't educate kids with high potential they're still going to end up stupid and ignorant.

The complexity of intelligence and its inheritance is also such that you can't be assured that intelligent parents will necessary have intelligent children.

You don't know what you've got, and you'll only get the best out of them if they're pushed, you just don't know until after you've pushed them if that pushing will necessary have been any use. It's an interesting study, but a more useful one would have been one that helped to identify intelligent children at a young age, or one that enables us to tailor educational methods to better fit the people it's aimed at.

O.

[Rhiannon]

I think what's important is a good education, not parents pushing children too hard. There is a discussion to be over whether our current education system delivers that, but adding extra work and extra homework into an already crammed (and often stressful) schedule for young children can't be healthy. So teaching Kumon maths, if that is a good method, might be preferential to how it is currently taught. What isn't such a good idea is overloading children with work and expectation, not to mention teaching extra-curricular stuff that might clash with class-taught work, leading to confusion rather than success.

I do agree about the importance of tailoring education to the child. the biggest thing that made a difference to my son's education though was going from a class of 32 to a class of 11.

[Hope]

As many of you will be aware, much is made of the regular PISA results by governments the world over.

I often wonder whether the folk quoting the figures even understand them.

In his book 'Outliers: the Story of Success', Malcolm Gladwell notes that the way in which Eastern languages say large numbers is actually helpful to 'easy' Maths.  Unlike our twenties and fifties, they say two tens and ... /five tens and ... .  Unless we radically change how our language works, native English speakers (and speakers of some other languages) will always find Maths that much harder than others.

[Harrowby Hall]

My objections to politicians using PISA scores to beat teachers over the head with are:

(a)   The schools used are specially selected and - in some locations - may be training the students in PISA methodology,
(b)   PISA reflects, generally, a highly didactic approach to knowledge and skills acquisition,
(c)   PISA takes little note of experience or creativity.

PISA is an excellent tool for managerialist politicians concerned with schooling. It has little value in education.

[Udayana]

I've been quite influenced by Edward de Bono's books on thinking (eg the BBC thinking course) . He suggests that our usual measure of "intelligence" is like a measure of potential power of our brains, but we can learn various techniques to best control and apply that "power". 

So...

a) Just because someone has inherited the genes to be highly intelligent doesn't mean that they will necessarily fulfill their potential - environmental factors:  poor nutrition, lack of social interaction etc could inhibit development. We should try to enable all everyone to get to their maximum capability.

b) People should learn how to think - to optimize the utility of the intelligence that they have - no matter how much or little they have ended up with.