Join us in this episode as we delve into the complex interplay of genetics and environment on a child's educational achievement with Dr. Rosa Cheesman, a leading researcher in the field of behavioral genetics. There's a prevailing theory that a child's environment, comprised of various levels like parents, school, neighborhood, and municipality, interacts with their genetic propensities, influencing their educational success. However, comprehensive tests of this theory across multiple environmental levels have been limited until now.

Dr. Cheesman discusses her team's innovative research where they linked population-wide administrative data on standardized test results, schools, residential identifiers to the Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), encompassing over 23,000 genotyped parent-child trios. By using multilevel models, they explored the interactions between polygenic indices for educational attainment (EA-PGI) and various environmental levels.

Their findings reveal a fascinating interaction between a student’s EA-PGI and schools, suggesting that higher-performing schools can raise overall achievement without leaving children with lower EA-PGI behind. Surprisingly, they found that neighborhood, district, and municipality variation contributed little to achievement and did not interact significantly with a child's individual EA-PGI.

With an eye towards policy implications, Dr. Cheesman provides insights into how this research can inform strategies to reduce social inequality in educational achievement, specifically through a focus on providing unequal support across schools for children facing difficulties.

Dr. Rosa Cheesman, Environment, Genetics, Educational Attainment, EA-PGI, Multilevel Models, Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child Cohort Study, MoBa, Schools, Achievement, Social Inequality.

Cheesman, R., et al. A population-wide gene-environment interaction study on how genes, schools, and residential areas shape achievement. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-022-00145-8