BMJ  2006;333:1080-1081 (25 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.39037.543148.80

Editorials

Educational performance in twins

Is no different from that seen in singletons by adolescence

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In this week's BMJ, Christensen and colleagues¹ investigate two questions that are of popular and medical-scientific interest. Firstly, do twins have lower intellectual skills and educational achievements than singletons and, secondly, is birth weight associated with intellectual and educational performance? The authors look at the second question in both twins and singletons. They also open up the question of the link between intelligence and education, because the main comparator studies used IQ-type outcomes rather than educational performance.^{2 3}

The study uses the Danish registration system linked with the Danish demographic database, the national hospital discharge register, the register of compulsory school completion assessments and test scores, and the Danish twin registry. They therefore had data on standard national educational outcomes, birth weights, and other demographic and parental variables for the entire relevant population of twins, and for a large representative sample of the comparable population of singletons.

Firstly, do twins . . . [Full text of this article]

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Article

The cognitive cost of being a twin: evidence from comparisons within families in the Aberdeen children of the 1950s cohort study

Georgina A Ronalds, Bianca L De Stavola, and David A Leon
BMJ 2005 331: 1306. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]