Asbury and Wai ("Journal of School Choice," 2019) perform a valuable service by summarizing much available behavior--genetic research on academic achievement. However they consider that no specific policies stem from the research body at this time. Here we do propose a policy based on some of our research using twins, namely that…

A variety of practices and specialised representational systems are required to understand, communicate and construct molecular genetics knowledge. This study describes teachers' use of multimodal representations of molecular genetics concepts and how their strategies and choice of resources were interpreted, understood and used by students to…

Creativity is an important twenty-first century skill often overlooked in higher education curricula, particularly in the sciences. Students need opportunities to practice and demonstrate their creativity and gain an awareness of the importance of such skills to enhance their graduate capabilities. One way is to embed creativity into course…

Purpose: This review article summarizes a program of longitudinal investigation of twins' language acquisition with a focus on causal pathways for specific language impairment (SLI) and nonspecific language impairment in children at 4 and 6 years with known history at 2 years. Method: The context of the overview is established by legacy scientific…

This study sought an answer to the question whether the digitalization of play is technological mutation or digital evolution. To this end, 14 studies published over the last five years were reviewed and discussed under four themes, namely digital technology and children, parents', and teachers' perceptions of digital technology, screen effects,…

Using the Short Form 12 Health Survey this cross-sectional study examined parental well-being in caregivers of children with one of three genetic disorders associated with intellectual disability; Down syndrome, Rett syndrome and the CDKL5 disorder. Data were sourced from the Western Australian Down Syndrome (n = 291), Australian Rett Syndrome (n…

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most prevalent childhood neurodevelopmental disorder. Arising from a complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors, along with epigenetic changes during foetal development, ADHD is a lifelong condition that impacts children's academic and social functioning in numerous adverse…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) are neurodevelopmental disorders with strong genetic components. Increasingly, research attention has focused on whether genetic factors conveying susceptibility for these conditions, also influence the risk of other health conditions, such as cancer. We examined the occurrence of…

Modern behavior-genetic studies of twins in the United States, Australia, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom show that genes account for most of the variance in children's reading ability by the end of the 1st year of formal reading instruction. Strong genetic influence continues across the grades, though the relevant genes vary for reading words…

Background: This phenomenological study explores the perceptions, hopes, and dreams of relationships and parenting of women with a genetic intellectual disability. Method: Five women with both 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) and intellectual disability took part in semistructured interviews. Their subjective interpretations were analysed using…

This work analyses the answers to a questionnaire from 8,285 in-service and pre-service teachers from 23 countries, elaborated by the Biohead-Citizen research project, to investigate teachers' conceptions related to the genetic determinism of human behaviour. A principal components analysis is used to assess the main trends in all the interviewed…

Autism research funding across the world has disproportionately been invested in biological and genetic research, despite evidence that these topics are not prioritized by community members. We sought to determine whether a similar pattern was evident in Australia's autism research funding landscape between 2008 and 2017, by analysing the nation's…

The genetic factor structure of a range of learning measures was explored in twin children, recruited in preschool and followed to Grade 2 ("N"?=?2,084). Measures of orthographic learning and word reading were included in the analyses to determine how these patterned with the learning processes. An exploratory factor analysis of the…

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…

Although gender differences in mathematics are smaller than they have been in the past, prominent voices still attribute these differences to a variety of fixed individual factors, such as genetic characteristics of men and women. We hold the alternative view that these differences can be ultimately attributed to malleable factors. From this…