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I posted on the musical talent thread but have decided to start a new thread as the point I wanted to start discussion on isn't specific to music.

Madoosa wrote:


and I responded:

Could you cite two or three of the most convincing of these books etc.? I strongly doubt this assertion, but I'm not sure I've ever seen well conducted research that addresses it, and I'd be very interested to do so.

To expand:

While there are, of course, spectacular individual success stories involving children's achievement rapidly improving once they land in an educationally favourable environment, it would take careful research to conclude that this happened to such an extent that an earlier suboptimal environment systematically has no effect on later achievement. Such research would have to be particularly careful about the definition of "the right environment" - for example, since children are so different, it is tempting to say that an environment is right if the child flies in it, which will make the claim tautologically true (only some children will be seen never to encounter the right environment). It would also be quite difficult to disentangle the effects of having the kind of parents who take action to optimise a child's educational environment (and have all the necessary resources to do so), from the effect of the environment itself. Still, one could imagine making the attempt; for example, if you can identify a particular school that is believed to be a good environment for a certain group of children but which can't admit all of them, and chooses some of them by lottery, maybe you can track those who do and do not win the lottery and attend that school, and see what happens to them later.

Here's the closest I can come to research on the topic.

In the UK there is a perennial, politically hot debate about the effect, if any, that independent (private) schools have on their students' later achievement. Context: we have no systematic gifted-specific education in the state sector (selective state "grammar" schools exist in a few areas only, the requirement for state schools to maintain a register of gifted and talented students has recently been ended, and few schools did much with it anyway) and many independent schools thrive by being highly selective and being perceived as being good environments for clever children. Our most selective universities, e.g. Cambridge, are regularly criticised for taking too many children from independent schools, the argument being that children from those schools have been hothoused into performing above their natural ability and are being admitted in place of more able but less paper-qualified students from state schools, who, it is claimed, would out-perform the independent school students at university if they were admitted. This argument is based on the same premise that Madoosa gave above: that once clever students get to a good educational environment, e.g. Cambridge university, it won't matter what their previous education was, they will quickly achieve in line with their earlier promise (say, correlated with their achievement levels as 4yos). Now, it is fairly uncontroversial that these very selective independent schools send out students who have, on average, higher exam marks* than the same students would have if they had attended state schools. (Some students would get 4As anywhere, but some get 4As at Eton who wouldn't have done at XYZ comp.) What would we see if the main claim were true? On average, comparing two students with the same exam marks at entry to Cambridge, one from an independent school and one from a state school, we would see that the former would do less well at Cambridge than the latter. Cambridge did the obvious multifactorial analysis of their entrants, investigating what factors known at the time of entry predict performance while at Cambridge. They found that this is not what you see: in fact, to predict performance at Cambridge, what you need to know is exam marks on entry. Taking school type into account does not significantly improve your predictions. In other words, it may be that the independent schools are in some sense "artificially" boosting their students' performance, but if so, the effect persists at least through undergraduate degree performance. I find this pretty convincing, but then, it agrees with my intuitions so maybe I would! [There is other research claiming to show the opposite by looking at a wider range of universities and courses, but it is problematic because it does not manage to account properly for different patterns of course choice and the way these are influenced by school type. Looking at a single highly prestigious university is a lot easier, methodologically.]

ETA links: Predictive effectiveness of metrics and the less statistically dense School background is not a factor in Cambridge degree success. (Note: these are not peer-reviewed.)

[* note for UK experts: details of which exams we mean at the first link. For most subjects, it's AS UMS (not predicted A level grades, which are practically all AAA+).]

Indeed, if we actually believed that a suboptimal educational environment had no effect on later achievement, we wouldn't be concerned about young children who are not being challenged (provided that they're reasonably happy: one could think it would have no long-term effect, but still want to change it because the child was unhappy right then, of course). I claim that the mere fact that you're here reading this is some evidence to suggest that you think educational environment can have a long-lasting effect on your child. That's certainly what I think: I may not be able to prove it, but I think that the steps I'm taking to get my DS systematically challenged are building him a better brain and a better character than he'd have otherwise, and that both of those things will affect his achievement long term.

Research that challenges my intuitions is interesting, though...