Genetic Epidemiology, Translational Neurogenomics, Psychiatric Genetics and Statistical Genetics Laboratories investigate the pattern of disease in families, particularly identical and non-identical twins, to assess the relative importance of genes and environment in a variety of important health problems.
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PMID
17708698
TITLE
Does sharing the same class in school improve cognitive abilities of twins?
ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the effect of classroom separation of twins on their cognitive abilities, measured at different ages in Dutch primary education. We use a large longitudinal school-based sample of twins and their classmates. The analysis tries to reduce the bias by unobserved factors due to the nonrandom assignment of twins by taking into account differences in school environment, previous test scores and variation in class assignment between years. We find that classroom separation matters for language in Grade 2. Nonseparated twins score higher on language, and the difference is larger for same-sex pairs. This finding is robust for various methods that take unobserved effects into account. In addition, there is some evidence for higher scores in arithmetic in Grade 2. For the higher grades we find no effect of classroom separation on cognitive ability. In the analysis of the effect of a separation of at least 3 years we find that separation increases language performance between Grade 6 and 8 for opposite-sex pairs.
DATE PUBLISHED
2007 Aug
HISTORY
PUBSTATUS PUBSTATUSDATE
pubmed 2007/08/22 09:00
medline 2007/12/07 09:00
entrez 2007/08/22 09:00
AUTHORS
NAME COLLECTIVENAME LASTNAME FORENAME INITIALS AFFILIATION AFFILIATIONINFO
Webbink D Webbink Dinand D CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, The Hague, the Netherlands. h.d.webbink@cpb.nl
Hay D Hay David D
Visscher PM Visscher Peter M PM
INVESTIGATORS
JOURNAL
VOLUME: 10
ISSUE: 4
TITLE: Twin research and human genetics : the official journal of the International Society for Twin Studies
ISOABBREVIATION: Twin Res Hum Genet
YEAR: 2007
MONTH: Aug
DAY:
MEDLINEDATE:
SEASON:
CITEDMEDIUM: Print
ISSN: 1832-4274
ISSNTYPE: Print
MEDLINE JOURNAL
MEDLINETA: Twin Res Hum Genet
COUNTRY: England
ISSNLINKING: 1832-4274
NLMUNIQUEID: 101244624
PUBLICATION TYPE
PUBLICATIONTYPE TEXT
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Twin Study
COMMENTS AND CORRECTIONS
GRANTS
GENERAL NOTE
KEYWORDS
MESH HEADINGS
DESCRIPTORNAME QUALIFIERNAME
Achievement
Child
Cognition
Cooperative Behavior
Educational Measurement
Educational Status
Female
Humans
Longitudinal Studies
Male
Netherlands
Schools
Sex Characteristics
Social Environment
Twins, Dizygotic psychology
Twins, Monozygotic psychology
SUPPLEMENTARY MESH
GENE SYMBOLS
CHEMICALS
OTHER ID's