Interest in the study of gene-environment interaction has recently grown due to the sudden availability of molecular genetic data--in particular, polygenic scores--in many long-running longitudinal studies. Identifying and estimating statistical interactions comes with several analytic and inferential challenges; these challenges are heightened…

The field of science education has put effort into providing opportunities for students to position themselves as epistemic agents pursuing the goal of making sense of natural phenomena. However, students often struggle in adapting scientific practices to achieve the sense-making goal. In this position paper, we conceptualise students'…

Transforming fluorescence spectrometers into cost-effective, portable devices provides the potential for field-based applications in biological, environmental, and clinical research and education. However, the majority of developed spectroscopic technologies continue to require heavy, expensive equipment and trained personnel for operation or do…

Over the last 20 years, statistics preparation has become vital for a broad range of scientific fields, and statistics coursework has been readily incorporated into undergraduate and graduate programs. However, a gap remains between the computational skills taught in statistics service courses and those required for the use of statistics in…

The "maker" movement is gaining widespread attention, especially in the field of laboratory education. Here we have built a low-cost, "do-it-yourself", open-source thermal conductivity cell detector (TCD) for chemical laboratory analysis, which is assembled from thermal conductivity gas sensor elements and 3D-printed flow cell…

At first sight, discussing the relevance of innovation, professionalisation and evaluation for higher education quality management seems to be redundant. Universities can legitimately be expected to be innovation-friendly, to pursue professionalism in their approaches to teaching and to be appreciative towards an evidence-supported management…

Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former principal of Osmania University, traveled in 1922 from India to Japan as Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad to assess Japan's educational system. In Japan and Its Educational System, a report published in 1923, Masood concluded that education had…

We have entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which has brought widespread digital transformation with advanced and broadened technologies including artificial intelligence (AI). To help students prosper in a world full of AI applications, it is important for us to offer students sufficient AI-integrated learning opportunities across different…

Knowledge translation (KT) is key to the scientific process, yet academic work produced often does not reach the public. In this article a unique undergraduate KT term assignment is presented where students summarize a large body of research into an artifact for public use. This assignment model may increase student engagement and learning…

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) can be a very effective means to introduce a large number of students to research. CUREs are often an extension of the instructor's research, which may make them difficult to replicate in other settings because of differences in expertise or facilities. The BASIL (Biochemistry Authentic…

Ethics review of research involving humans has become something of an institution in recent years. It is intended to protect participants from harm and, to that end, follows rigorous standards. Given recent changes in research methodologies utilized in medical research, it may be that ethics review for some kinds of studies needs to be reexamined.…

It has been 150 years since D.I. Mendeleev formulated the Periodic law and expressed it visually in the form of a table of elements in 1869. As is clearly well known today, Mendeleev's ideas, confirmed by the discovery of the elements he predicted, turned out to be very promising indeed. However, Mendeleev was not the first, nor the only scientist…

Background: In public health emergencies, evidence, intervention, decisions and translation proceed simultaneously, in greatly compressed timeframes, with knowledge and advice constantly in flux. Idealised approaches to evidence-based policy and practice are ill equipped to deal with the uncertainties arising in evolving situations of need. Key…

In the years 2015-2018, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and the Italian Ministry of Defense proposed the joint initiative "Space for Your Future. The ISS: Innovatio, Scientia, Sapientia" in partnership with the Italian Space Agency. It was a competition addressed to secondary school students and aimed at…

This paper examines the genetic ("nature") and environmental ("nurture") influences on why students vary in their reading skills. We review core findings from the field of modern behavioral genetics, a discipline that studies the interplay of genetic and environmental influences, on reading science. Additionally, we provide an…