Genetics helps explain children’s motivation to learn.

A study from Ohio State University suggests that genes may be part of the motivation equation. The study was done on more than 13,000 twins from six countries and found that that about 40-50% of of the differences in children’s motivation to learn could possibly have come from the genetics they inherited from their parents. Stephen Petrill, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study, was surprised by these results because he originally believed that the shared environment of twins, such as family and teachers in common, was a larger factor than genetics. However, genetics and non-shared environmental factors showed the largest effect on learning motivation and the shared environment had an insignificant effect. Petrill said that the findings were pretty consistent across the different countries, even though their cultures and educational systems were different. The study involved separate studies of twins ages 9-16 in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Germany, Russia and United States. The methodology and questions were slightly different in each country, but measured the similar concepts; students completed a measure of how much they enjoyed various academic activities and to rate their own  ability in different subjects. They compared how close the answers were for fraternal twins with identical twins; the amount that the identical twins' answers more closely matched than the fraternal twins', it suggested to the researchers a stronger genetic factor. 

The results that they found does not suggest any gene for how much a child likes to learn, but they interpret the data to show that it's much more complex than originally thought and that genetics may very well be an important factor. I find it interesting because many times, if a child does not like to learn or has trouble, the child is blamed. Parents, teachers, etc. sometimes treat the child as if they are just lazy and punish them in some way for not being able to motivate themselves. This study, I think, is something to work off of because everyone is different and maybe genetics really does play into learning motivation. It's not an excuse, of course, for someone actually just wanting to be lazy and not learn, but some people just don't have the capability and shouldn't be blamed for it.