This study examines how socioeconomic status (SES) interacts with genetic factors to influence reading achievement. It suggests that genetic influences on reading skills are weaker in lower-SES conditions and more pronounced in higher-SES environments, while also highlighting how the impact of genes and the environment may vary across different geographic regions.

This project explores the moderating influence of location and opportunity on the etiology of mental health in children.

This study examines how different factors from the individual children (e.g., cognitive, affective characteristics), their family (e.g., home literacy environment), school (e.g., school climate), and neighborhood (e.g., child opportunity index), contribute to students' reading achievement.

This study highlights the importance of understanding how genetic predispositions and environmental factors interact to influence children’s school achievement. It emphasizes the need for more inclusive research that includes racialized groups, as current evidence overwhelmingly focuses on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations, risking overgeneralization and potential harm to underrepresented communities.

This study explores how genetic predispositions and environments interact to shape children's school achievement, emphasizing the importance of considering diverse contexts like home and school. It highlights a critical need for more inclusive research that incorporates racialized groups to avoid biased conclusions and ensure findings apply broadly across populations.

This study explores how family socioeconomic status (SES) affects how children respond to reading interventions. It found that children from higher-SES families showed greater improvement in decoding and expressive vocabulary skills after receiving intervention, highlighting the importance of considering individual factors when planning educational support.

This study explores how executive functioning (EF), reading, and math abilities are connected, finding that poor EF, as reported by parents, is a shared cognitive risk factor for reading and math difficulties. The results reveal that this overlap is largely driven by shared genetic influences, with additional contributions from environmental factors, highlighting the complex interplay between genetics and environment in learning.

This study examines how shared genetic and environmental factors contribute to the overlap between learning difficulties like reading and math challenges, as well as reading and ADHD symptoms, in children from third to ninth grade. The findings suggest that reading and math difficulties are more strongly influenced by common risk factors compared to the relationship between reading and ADHD, providing valuable insights for improving interventions and classification of learning disabilities.

This study examines racial biases in standardized tests and teacher evaluations by analyzing the Woodcock-Johnson III Picture Vocabulary scale (WJPV) and the Academic Competence subscale from the Social Skills Rating Scale Teacher form (SSRS-T). Results show that both measures exhibit bias, with the WJPV demonstrating a greater extent of differential item and test functioning (DTF), highlighting the need for careful scrutiny of both standardized tests and teacher-reported evaluations to ensure fairness in assessing student achievement.

This study uses meta-analysis to examine how genetics and environmental factors contribute to connections between reading, ADHD symptoms, and math ability in children. It found stronger shared risk factors between reading and math than between reading and ADHD, highlighting the importance of considering study moderators and diverse research sources for accurate insights.

This study examines how the quality of a school, as indicated by its grade, influences the genetic and environmental factors affecting early literacy skills in young children. The findings suggest that children in lower-graded schools experience greater environmental influences on pre-reading skills compared to those in higher-graded schools, highlighting the variability in educational environments beyond socioeconomic factors.

This meta-analysis explores how genetic and environmental factors influence reading comprehension, finding that genetics play a strong role (59%), while shared environments have a smaller but significant impact (16%). The study highlights how factors like grade level, study design, and response methods can affect these estimates, providing valuable insights for understanding and supporting reading development.

This study investigates how cocaine affects brain cells called astrocytes, finding that even low doses can cause significant damage, including oxidative stress and changes to cell structure and function. The antioxidant N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) was shown to protect astrocytes from cocaine's toxic effects, suggesting its potential as a treatment for preventing cocaine-related brain damage.

This study examines how genetic and environmental factors shape children's experiences in four key environments: home, classroom, school, and neighborhood, using a twin design. Findings revealed that home chaos is influenced by shared and non-shared environmental factors, while genetic influences varied across classroom, school, and neighborhood environments, highlighting the complex interplay between genes and individual experiences.

This study investigates how school quality, as reflected by school grades, influences the development of early literacy skills in children. It found that environmental factors play a larger role in shaping pre-reading skills in lower-rated schools, suggesting that differences in school environments beyond socioeconomic status significantly impact early literacy development.

This study explores how genetic predispositions and environmental contexts work together to shape children’s school performance through gene-by-environment interactions. It highlights the lack of diverse research samples and calls for more inclusive studies to ensure findings are applicable to children from racialized groups, preventing harmful overgeneralizations.