How family background affects children’s differences in school performance

Talk by Sophie von Stumm, University of York, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow, as part of the Colloquium of the Département d'études cognitives / Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Children’s differences in school performance have pervasive long-term influence on their education, health, and wellbeing. Children’s differences in school performance are evident from the first day of primary school and are relatively stable throughout the years of compulsory education. The major source of children’s differences in school performance is family background, not schools. Understanding why and how family background inequalities produce differences in children’s education is key for designing effective interventions that improve children’s life outcomes. 

In this talk, I will focus on the role of the gene-environment interplay in the transmission of family background inequality in education, which has often been ignored in previous research. Yet, children select, modify, and create their environments according to their genetic propensities, which in turn become drivers of children’s complex, reciprocal transactions and interactions with the environment that produce their educational differences.

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