A study conducted by Plug and Vijverberg showed that the environment that a child grows up in also affects his or her future academic performance.
Another study was conducted by Campbell and Ramey to test the socioeconomic effect on intelligence and it showed promising results for children at high risk of academic failure when there was an early intervention.
The effect has been demonstrated as far back as World War II in which military fighter pilots were divided into groups based on a selection battery which included ability and motivation measures.
Evidence shows that education and intelligence have a complex interaction, and this is demonstrated in a longitudinal study by Richards and Sacker.
[9] They collected data from the British 1946 birth cohort and investigated how childhood intelligence was predictive of other outcomes later in life including educational attainment and mental ability at 53 years old (using the National Adult Reading Test).
The Critical Thinking project at Human Science Lab, London, is involved in scientific study of all major educational systems in prevalence today to assess how the systems are working to promote or impede critical thinking and intelligence.
The paper argues that the inherited genetic traits are more important than environment when predicting academic success.
This effect, however, could arise either because of inherited genetic traits, or because more intelligent parents place greater emphasis on academic achievement, meaning it is unclear how much influence genes have.
They conclude that while ability is a predictor of educational attainment it is not the complete answer, leaving space for other influences, such as environment and parenting.
Using the Minnesota Twin Family Study, they investigated the genetic and environmental influences on intelligence and school performance.
This number dropped to 34% when other predictors of school grade such as engagement in class and family risk were included in the analysis, but this is still a large portion of shared genetic variance.