The talk addresses the rapidly developing field of genetically informative studies in education. The Laboratory for Cognitive Investigations and Behavioural Genetics at Tomsk State University has joined an international effort to provide new insights into genetic and environmental underpinnings of individual differences in cognitive, motivational and emotional processes related to children’s learning and academic achievement. To this end, the Russian School Twin Registry (RSTR) has been established and an interdisciplinary programme of research is under way. The establishment of the Twin Registry in Russia is an important undertaking as relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors may differ as a function of socio-cultural settings. Applying genetically informative designs to the study of children’s development in Russia and comparing the results with those from large Twin Projects in other countries will provide new insights into the role of specific educational and cultural environments. Behavioural genetic research into educationally relevant traits has moved beyond estimating the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors to individual differences. Many important findings have recently emerged from this research, suggesting that aetiology of individual differences is multi-factorial, dynamic, and complex. In this talk I will present some latest unexpected results from twin studies. For example, academic achievement - such performance in reading, language and mathematics - has been found to be highly heritable throughout school education in the UK. On the contrary, heritability of general cognitive ability has been found to be only moderately heritable in the early school years. Heritability of general cognitive ability has also been shown to increase gradually, reaching substantial levels in adulthood. It is possible that high heritability of reading and mathematics can be explained by the high homogeneity of educational environments. For example, the UK National Curriculum is highly uniform and therefore may decrease the environmental contribution to the variance in these traits. On the contrary, general cognitive ability is not explicitly taught at schools, and therefore may be under highly variable environmental influences across individuals, especially early in development. As children go through school, they may begin to use their acquired new skills in ways to further develop their general cognitive ability. Active gene-environment correlations, whereby children experience, modify, and select their environments differently, depending in part on their genetic uniqueness, may contribute to the observed increase in heritability of IQ. Other findings from twin studies suggest that the extent to which a person performs similarly in different school subjects largely depends on the effects of the same genetic factors. On the contrary, discrepancies in performance in different subjects seem to largely stem from environmental factors. The results, including those from the RSTR, also suggest that individual differences in motivation, interest, and self-esteem develop through complex co-action of genetic and environmental factors. Molecular genetic research has begun to identify specific DNA polymorphisms that are involved in genetic effects on educational outcomes. This research suggests that every individual is likely to have a unique combination of genetic variants, each having only a small effect on abilities and achievement. Moreover, each genetic variant contributes to many different traits. Contrary to common opinion, these genetic effects are not static or deterministic, but change throughout life and in different educational and cultural contexts. Further advances in educationally relevant genomic research might help understand the aetiology of individual differences in learning and find ways to improve learning for all.