Genes Are Key to Academic Success.

• Position: SCHOLASTIC ACHIEVEMENT

For many years, research has linked educational achievement to life trajectories, such as occupational status, health, or happiness but, if performing well in school predicts better life outcomes, what predicts how well someone will do throughout school?

"Around two-thirds of individual differences in school achievement are explained by differences in children's DNA, but less is known about how these factors contribute to an individual's academic success over time," says Margherita Malanchini, a psychology postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

Malanchini and Kaili Rimfeld, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King's College London (UK), analyzed test scores from primary through the end of compulsory education of more than 6,000 pairs of twins.

They found educational achievement to be highly stable throughout schooling, meaning that most students who started off well in primary school continued to do well until graduation. Genetic factors explained about 70% of this stability, while the twins shared environment contributed to about 25%, and their nonshared environment, such as different...