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Early exposure to home chaos relates to poor school performance. This association has been found consistently in educational research, however little is known about underlying common genetic and environmental factors that might affect both constructs, thus confound the effect. Genetics explain about 60 % of variation in school per-formance, while (non-) shared environment constitutes the remaining variance. Also differences in home chaos - often considered an "environmental" factor - are partially influenced genetically. Thus, we investigate the effect of home chaos on school grades, while controlling for genetic and environmental confounders. We analyzed longitudinal data on school grades and home chaos in the TwinLife study (1041 twin pairs aged 11 and 13). Applying a biometric cross-lagged model allowed us to combine variance decomposition with estimating sta-bility, correlational and cross-lagged paths while controlling for genetic and environmental confounders and strengthens the ability to draw causal inference. Results suggest that genetic confounding fully explains the effects of chaos on grades, also implying mechanisms of gene-environment interplay.

In this article I test whether students’ educational expectations respond to signalsof academic potential and whether this responsiveness varies by socio-economicstatus (SES). I address these questions by combining sociological and behavioralgenetics perspectives which comes with two advantages. First, it provides a moredetailed theoretical picture of the mechanisms of the formation of educational expectations by disentangling whether expectations respond to prior academic performance as an observed signal of academic potential or other unobserved genetically influenced signals of academic potential. Second, it provides a more accurate estimate of the responsiveness to academic performance by controlling for unobserved genetic and shared environmental confounders. Using panel data from the German TwinLife survey I find that the responsiveness to prior performance is entirely explained by genetic und shared environmental confounding. Instead, students update their expectations based on unobserved genetically influenced signals of academic potential. Students with a high SES are less responsive to these signals.