The practical utility of genetic screening in school settings

Optimal Evaluation Policies to Identify Students with Reading Disabilities

Reading disabilities affect 10-20% of students in the US. Untreated students fall behind their typically developing peers, leading to poor long-term outcomes. While instructional interventions can help, they are most effective when implemented early. Inexpensive screening tests can be used to monitor and flag at-risk students who may need expensive follow-up diagnostic evaluations that determine eligibility for intervention. However, conventional wisdom holds that the accuracy of these tests increase with grade level. Schools that do not have the capacity to do follow-up evaluations on every student flagged by screening are therefore believed to face an operational trade-off in allocating resources for evaluations, balancing the need for early intervention against budget constraints and legal obligations to honor direct parent or teacher requests. We examine how school administrators can choose evaluation policies to maximize benefits from intervention for students and ensure equitable allocation across diverse backgrounds. We model identification by optimizing over a time-dependent Bernoulli process which incorporates the screening test accuracy and the benefits from intervention at different grade levels. In collaboration with researchers from the Florida Center for Reading Research, we use longitudinal data from school districts across the state to empirically estimate these parameters and numerically solve for the optimal policies. Our study provides actionable insights for school administrators making resource allocation decisions and policy makers considering changes to laws governing the identification process. In this context, counter to conventional wisdom the screening test accuracy does not increase with grade level. To maximize the benefit to students under the current identification process, schools should simply evaluate as many students as their budget allows as early as possible. At existing budget levels, this policy also results in maximally equitable allocations. Changes to the identification process that ease legal obligations can increase benefits by up to 66% and decrease disparities by up to 100% without additional funding.

Experts' Views on Children's Access to Community-Based Therapeutic and Education Services After Genomic Sequencing Results

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate how community-based experts respond to families seeking therapeutic and educational support services after pediatric genomic sequencing for rare conditions.

METHODS

We interviewed 15 experts in the provision of community-based services for children with intellectual differences, developmental differences, or both, as part of a large study examining the utility of exome sequencing.

RESULTS

Interviewees highlighted the complexity of the overall referral and assessment system for therapeutic or educational needs, that genetic diagnoses are secondary to behavioral observations in respect to eligibility for the provision of services, and that social capital drives service acquisition. Although emphasizing that genetic results do not currently provide sufficient information for determining service eligibility, interviewees also highlighted their hopes that genetics would be increasingly relevant in the future.

CONCLUSION

Genomic results do not usually provide information that directly impacts service provision. However, a positive genomic test result can strengthen evidence for behavioral diagnoses and the future trajectory of a child's condition and support needs. Interviewees' comments suggest a need to combine emerging genetic knowledge with existing forms of therapeutic and educational needs assessment, and for additional supports for families struggling to navigate social and therapeutic services.

Schoolhouse risk: Can we mitigate the polygenic Pygmalion effect?

BACKGROUND

Although limited in predictive accuracy, polygenic scores (PGS) for educational outcomes are currently available to the public via direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies. Further, there is a growing movement to apply PGS in educational settings via 'precision education.' Prior scholarship highlights the potentially negative impacts of such applications, as disappointing results may give rise a "polygenic Pygmalion effect." In this paper two studies were conducted to identify factors that may mitigate or exacerbate negative impacts of PGS.

METHODS

Two studies were conducted. In each, 1188 students were randomized to one of four conditions: Low-percentile polygenic score for educational attainment (EA-PGS), Low EA-PGS + Mitigating information, Low EA-PGS + Exacerbating information, or Control. Regression analyses were used to examine differences between conditions.

RESULTS

In Study 1, participants randomized to Control reported significantly higher on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), Competence Scale (CS), Academic Efficacy Scale (AES) and Educational Potential Scale (EPS). CS was significantly higher in the Low EA-PGS + Mitigating information condition. CS and AES were significantly lower in the Low EA-PGS + Exacerbating information condition compared to the Low EA-PGS + Mitigating information condition. In Study 2, participants randomized to Control reported significantly higher CS and AES. Pairwise comparisons did not show significant differences in CS and AES. Follow-up pairwise comparisons using Tukey P-value correction did not find significant associations between non-control conditions.

CONCLUSION

These studies replicated the polygenic Pygmalion effect yet were insufficiently powered to detect significant effects of mitigating contextual information. Regardless of contextual information, disappointing EA-PGS results were significantly associated with lower assessments of self-esteem, competence, academic efficacy, and educational potential.

Infrastructuring Educational Genomics: Associations, Architectures, and Apparatuses

Technoscientific transformations in molecular genomics have begun to influence knowledge production in education. Interdisciplinary scientific consortia are seeking to identify 'genetic influences' on 'educationally relevant' traits, behaviors, and outcomes. This article examines the emerging 'knowledge infrastructure' of educational genomics, attending to the assembly and choreography of organizational associations, epistemic architecture, and technoscientific apparatuses implicated in the generation of genomic understandings from masses of bioinformation. As an infrastructure of datafied knowledge production, educational genomics is embedded in data-centered epistemologies and practices which recast educational problems in terms of molecular genetic associations-insights about which are deemed discoverable from digital bioinformation and potentially open to genetically informed interventions in policy and practice. While scientists claim to be 'opening the black box of the genome' and its association with educational outcomes, we open the black box of educational genomics itself as a source of emerging scientific authority. Data-intensive educational genomics does not straightforwardly 'discover' the biological bases of educationally relevant behaviors and outcomes. Rather, this knowledge infrastructure is also an experimental 'ontological infrastructure' supporting particular ways of knowing, understanding, explaining, and intervening in education, and recasting the human subjects of education as being surveyable and predictable through the algorithmic processing of bioinformation.

Rank concordance of polygenic indices

Polygenic indices (PGIs) are increasingly used to identify individuals at risk of developing disease and are advocated as screening tools for personalized medicine and education. Here we empirically assess rank concordance between PGIs created with different construction methods and discovery samples, focusing on cardiovascular disease and educational attainment. We find Spearman rank correlations between 0.17 and 0.93 for cardiovascular disease, and 0.40 and 0.83 for educational attainment, indicating highly unstable rankings across different PGIs for the same trait. Potential consequences for personalized medicine and gene-environment (G × E) interplay are illustrated using data from the UK Biobank. Simulations show how rank discordance mainly derives from a limited discovery sample size and reveal a tight link between the explained variance of a PGI and its ranking precision. We conclude that PGI-based ranking is highly dependent on PGI choice, such that current PGIs do not have the desired precision to be used routinely for personalized intervention.

Interpreting and reinterpreting heritability estimates in educational behavior genetics

Interpreting heritability estimates through the lens of cultural evolution presents two broad and interlinking problems for educational behavior genetics. First, the problem of interpreting high heritability of educational phenotypes as indicators of the genetic basis of traits, when these findings also reflect cultural homogeneity. Second, the problem of extrapolating from genetic research findings in education to policy and practice recommendations.

Nature vs. Nurture in Precision Education: Insights of Parents and the Public

BACKGROUND

The philosophical debate about the roles of nature versus nurture in human flourishing is not new. But the rise of precision education-a growing field of research that encourages the use of genetic data to inform educational trajectory and interventions to better meet student needs-has renewed historical and ethical concerns. A major worry is that "genetic hype" may skew public perceptions toward a deterministic perception of the child's educational trajectory, regardless of the child's capacities, and underestimation of environmental factors affecting educational outcomes. We tested this hypothesis with parents and adults from the general public in the US.

METHODS

A newly developed computerized implicit association test (IAT) to assess automatic associations between genetics or environments and student behaviors that are associated with educational achievement was administered to samples of parents of children below 21 years old (n = 450) and adults from the general public (n = 419). The samples were representative of the adult US population and adjusted to oversample Black/African American participants. An overall D score for participants' IATs (range: [-2, 2]) was calculated on the basis of the speed of participants' responses.

RESULTS

The mean IAT score for both samples indicated stronger association between the quality of being a good student and environment rather than genetics (parents: mean=-0.146, t = -6.56, p < 0.001; general public: mean = -0.249, t = -9.45, p < 0.0001). Younger participants from the general public showed a stronger association between genetics and educational success than middle-aged participants (β = -0.301, p = 0.006).

CONCLUSION

The views of parents and the general public on behavioral genetics and education are complex but call for investment in creating educational environments that are supportive of student success. Future research is needed to understand differences across age groups and to explore views of other stakeholders involved in determining children's educational trajectories about the roles of nature versus nurture in precision education.