Little is known about the etiology of developmental change and continuity in educational achievement. Here, we study achievement from primary school to the end of compulsory education for 6000 twin pairs in the UK-representative Twins Early Development Study sample. Results showed that educational achievement is highly heritable across school years and across subjects studied at school (twin heritability ~60%; SNP heritability ~30%); achievement is highly stable (phenotypic correlations ~0.70 from ages 7 to 16). Twin analyses, applying simplex and common pathway models, showed that genetic factors accounted for most of this stability (70%), even after controlling for intelligence (60%). Shared environmental factors also contributed to the stability, while change was mostly accounted for by individual-specific environmental factors. Polygenic scores, derived from a genome-wide association analysis of adult years of education, also showed stable effects on school achievement. We conclude that the remarkable stability of achievement is largely driven genetically even after accounting for intelligence.

人们对教育成就的发展变化和连续性的病因知之甚少。在这里，我们研究了英国代表性双胞胎早期发展研究样本中 6000 对双胞胎从小学到义务教育结束的成绩。结果表明，教育成就在不同学年和在学校学习的科目之间具有高度遗传性（双胞胎遗传力约 60%；SNP 遗传力约 30%）；成绩高度稳定（7 至 16 岁的表型相关性约为 0.70）。应用单一和共同途径模型的双胞胎分析表明，即使在控制智力（60%）之后，遗传因素也占了这种稳定性的大部分（70%）。共同的环境因素也有助于稳定，而变化主要是由个体特定的环境因素造成的。来自成人受教育年限的全基因组关联分析的多基因分数也显示出对学校成绩的稳定影响。我们得出的结论是，即使在考虑了智力因素之后，成就的显着稳定性很大程度上也是由遗传驱动的。