Sydney - What's true of football is true of primary school: With a lack of innate ability, the best coach in the world isn't going to make that much of a difference in your performance. "The single biggest player in a child's learning outcome seems to be genetic endowment," Australian educational psychologist Brian Byrne said Friday.
His study, conducted over 10 years on three continents and involving the monitoring of 500 pairs of identical twins during their first three years of school, showed that a dedicated teacher is only going to play a minor role in a child acquiring literacy skills.
"The big influence is intellectual capacity," said the professor at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia. "It's the single biggest factor in early learning."
Byrne found only an 8-per-cent variation in literacy levels between twins in different classrooms who he studied in Australia, the United States and Scandinavia. He found nothing to bear out the claims of some teachers that better pay and better equipped schools could raise literacy levels by 30 and even 40 per cent.
"It seems to say that teachers are effective and that they are roughly equally effective," he said.
Byrne cautioned that it would be wrong to interpret the results as suggesting that the quality of the teaching doesn't matter.
"But what it does do is challenge the more commonly accepted view that it's the quality of the teaching that makes the difference," he said.
