Background: Children's academic achievement is considerably influenced by genetic factors, which rarely operate independently of environmental influences such as teachers' behaviour. Praise and punitive discipline are commonly used management strategies by teachers. However, their effects on the genetic expression of children's academic…

Classroom placement of twins is an ongoing issue for educational policy. Many educational jurisdictions have standard policy most commonly founded in the belief that separation supports individual identity, personal development and academic opportunity. This study examined the effects of classroom placement in a sample of 560 twin pairs whose…

This study describes the case of a student with congenital intestinal perforations and her experience with inclusive education in the Czech Republic. She is also a sister of an identical twin with cerebral palsy. The data were gained from semi-structured interviews and bio-graphical narratives of the student during her studies at the grammar…

A significant number of students with learning disabilities encounter challenges in acquiring knowledge, particularly in mathematics. Nonetheless, having a disability or being disadvantaged is not a preference or decision made by these students - or more generally, by these individuals; rather, this label is assigned to them by the prevailing…

Homework has traditionally been considered positive for students' academic achievement, to the extent that it makes children more responsible while learning. Nevertheless, making students do a large amount of homework has been one of the most criticised practices in recent years. Parental associations have long held the view that Spanish…

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been found to moderate the influence of genes and the environment on cognitive ability, such that genetic influence is greater when SES is higher, and the shared environment is greater when SES is lower, but not in all Western countries. The effects of both family and school SES on the heritability of literacy and…

The purpose of this study was to test the directionality of influence between reading comprehension (RC) and print exposure (PE), thereby estimating genetic and environmental effects of this relation. The sample consisted of 910 twins in fourth through ninth grades (M[subscript age] = 12.33 years, SD = 1.41) from the Florida Twin Project on…

Classroom-level influences on literacy skills in kindergarten through Grade 2, and on literacy and numeracy skills in Grades 3, 5, 7, and 9, were examined by comparing the similarity of twins who shared or did not share classrooms with each other. We analyzed two samples using structural equation modeling adapted for twin data. The first, Study 1,…

We investigated the double-deficit hypothesis (DDH) in samples of U.S. (N = 489), Australian (N = 264), and Scandinavian (N = 293) children followed from preschool to grade 2. Children were assigned to double deficit, single deficit and no deficit subtypes in preschool, kindergarten, and grade 1 and compared on reading and spelling in grades 1 and…

The present study examined, within a longitudinal family-informed design and across middle childhood, the predictive associations between preference for solitude and social wariness, two forms of social withdrawal, and peer difficulties. Specifically, preference for solitude, rather than social wariness, was expected to predict peer victimization…

The purpose of this study was to examine construct validity of methods of calculating lexical diversity in written narrative samples relative to children's performance on a reading vocabulary measure. For 234 children in first to fifth grade, written narratives were examined and compared between grades for number of different words (NDW), total…

Purpose: The objective of this study was to compare children with persistent versus transient preschool language delay on language, academic, and psychosocial outcomes in elementary school. Method: Children with persistent language delay (n = 30), transient language delay (n = 29), and no language delay (controls; n = 163) were identified from a…

The present study used a genetically informed design of twins raised in the same family (375 monozygotic and 290 dizygotic twins; 50.2% girls) to examine the association between adolescents' genetic risk for depressive symptoms and the course of the parent-child relationship quality throughout adolescence. Depressive symptoms and the quality of…

Researchers have identified sources of individual differences in writing across beginning and developing writers. The aim of the present study was to further clarify the sources of this variability by investigating the extent to which there are differences in genetic and environmental factors underlying the associations between lexical diversity,…

Previous research has established that learning to read improves children's performance on reading-related phonological tasks, including phoneme awareness (PA) and nonword repetition. Few studies have investigated whether literacy acquisition also promotes children's rapid automatized naming (RAN). We tested the hypothesis that literacy…