Genetic Associations with Mathematics Tracking and Persistence in Secondary School

The role of genes in education and learning is somewhat a taboo topic in the culture of modern education establishment. Here's a twit from one of the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference participants: https://twitter.com/Russwarne/status/1114991207468490753

A search of the #AERA19 program for "genetics" turns up 19 results. Only 1 is related to genetic influences on educational outcomes.

Just for giggles, compare this to a much more thoroughly researched topic https://www.city-journal.org/education-policy-race-whiteness:

A keyword search of the conference program reveals 422 hits for whiteness—more than for “personalized learning” (16), “school boards” (19), “standardized testing” (20), “high school graduation” (23) “reading achievement” (24), “digital learning” (25), “policy analysis” (31), “early education” (38), “teacher evaluation” (41) “literacy instruction” (42), “bilingual education” (48), and “achievement gap” (75) combined.

Anyway, back to the things that actually matter. Here's a talk by Paige Harden, introducing her (and her esteemed colleagues') work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQU0PNYYSBQ

And here is the pre-print: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/04/05/598532.full.pdf

Here's a graph that illustrates the key findings: https://imgur.com/a/toZJHyc Observe how the students' polygenic scores obtained from their DNA can be used to predict their trajectory through the high school math curriculum (and, following that, their progress in college etc.).

This is relevant to the recent discussions on tracking.

Submitted April 08, 2019 at 01:17PM by ineedmoresleep http://bit.ly/2IcYdq7