The importance of generic skills for life scientists is commonly recognised by employers, graduates, and higher education institutes. As it remains unclear which generic skills are relevant for different life sciences career paths, this study aims to give an overview to inform and inspire universities and students, by analysing 179 Dutch…

In peer feedback literature, little is known about the patterns of success for peer feedback activities in online learning environments. This study aims to explore the peer feedback patterns of successful, less successful, and unsuccessful higher education students for argumentative essay writing. In this exploratory study, 330 higher education…

Students are increasingly expected to take up proactive roles in feedback processes. While most feedback research focuses on asking, receiving, and engaging with feedback, some suggest that students must also proactively shape their feedback environment. This study explored graduate life science master's students' first impressions of a dialogue…

Students in higher engineering education should develop competencies to be prepared for their future professional careers. However, in the field of food technology it is not clear what set of competencies is most relevant. This paper created a comprehensive list of competencies for food technologists by combining both domain-specific and general…

DNA barcoding is an important molecular methodology for species identification that was developed over the last two decades and it should be covered in the biology bachelor curriculum. Here, we present an example of DNA barcoding by sequencing a segment of the 28S nuclear ribosomal large subunit rRNA gene of wild mushrooms and framing the…

Boundary crossing competence is needed to tackle complex problems and should therefore be facilitated in education. The Regional Learning Environment, a typical service learning environment practiced in Dutch life sciences education, offers students ample opportunities to develop boundary crossing competence through multi-stakeholder…

The goal of this study was to explore how students debate with their peers within a designed context using a digital dialogue game, and whether their epistemic beliefs are significant to the outcomes. Epistemic beliefs are known to colour student interactions within argumentative discourse, leading some students to hold back from interactions. By…

The aim of this study is to evaluate a teaching strategy designed to teach first-year undergraduate life sciences students at a research university how to learn to read authentic research articles. Our approach--based on the work done in the field of genre analysis and argumentation theory--means that we teach students to read research articles by…

This paper looks at eight comparative case-studies on academic entrepreneurs in life sciences conducted in Europe in 2008. The interviewees were selected from the KEINS database that lists all academic inventors from Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands who have one or more patent applications registered at the European Patent Office,…