Unlike most behavioral phenotypes, educational achievement is substantially influenced by environmental factors shared by siblings reared in the same home. For example, shared environmental factors have been estimated to account for 30% or more of the variance in educational attainment (Branigan et al., 2013). This strong evidence of shared environmental influence raises the question of what parents do to foster the educational attainment of the children they rear. Resolving this question is, however, difficult in intact nuclear families where environmental and genetic effects may be confounded by passive gene-environment correlational processes. As an alternative, we use data on adoptive families from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS) in an attempt to identify specific factors contributing to the shared environmental influence on educational attainment.
SIBS is a longitudinal study of 409 adoptive and 208 non-adoptive families and includes 1232 offspring and their rearing parents. SIBS offspring participants have been assessed up to three times, at an average (SD) age of 14.9 (1.9) at intake, 18.3 (2.1) at follow-up 1, and 22.4 (1.9) at follow-up 2. Rate of participation was 94% at the first and 92% at the second follow-up. SIBS participants are currently completing a third follow-up assessment, although data from that follow-up will not be used in this presentation. We investigated the following, not necessarily independent, mechanisms by which highly educated parents might foster the educational achievement of the children they rear (c.f., McGue et al., 2017): 1) by creating rearing environments that support the development of the cognitive and non-cognitive skills underlying academic achievement; 2) by contributing financially to the education of their children; 3) by establishing high academic expectations; 4) by helping their children complete academic tasks (e.g., homework, tutoring); 5) by providing a structured, non-chaotic home environment; and 6) by living in safe neighborhoods with good schools. We concluded that there is no single major way by which parents foster the academic achievement of their children. Perhaps the nature of the shared environmental influence on educational attainment is not altogether unlike the genetic influence, with multiple minor contributing factors.
Branigan, A. R., McCallum, K. J., & Freese, J. (2013). Variation in the Heritability of Educational Attainment: An International Meta-Analysis. Social Forces, 92(1),
McGue, M., Rustichini, A. & Iacono, W.G. (2017). Cognitive, non-cognitive and family background contributions to college attainment. Journal of Personality, 85(1): 65-78.
Funding source: Grant from the John Templeton Foundation
Cognition: Education, Intelligence, Memory, Attention , Development
