When truly spectacular events occur in the performing arts or in team sports, when the sets of artists or athletes respectively creating these events are discussed, a common phrase used in America to explain the "good fortune" that was involved in such unique occurrences is that "the stars aligned." In this commentary on:…

Molenaar's (2015) article concerns Developmental Systems Theory (DST) in relation to behavior genetics and he presents implications of DST for empirical research, especially the need for subject-specific studies. In this commentary, the article is discussed from a broader developmental science perspective, particularly regarded through the lens of…

One important focus for science education researchers over many years has been the attempts to replace students' commonsense and non-scientific explanations of various phenomena by scientific explanations. The approach we adopted almost three decades ago was conceptual mediation, and this was shown to have a considerable level of success with…

About two decades ago, Donald Stokes published "Pasteur's Quadrant" (Stokes, 1997). Stokes proposed that the motivations of different research projects can be understood as a two-dimensional system, with higher or lower concern for improving technology and practice on one dimension and higher or lower concern for improving fundamental…

Traditionally, European doctoral education has principally taken place within the binary relationship of professors and their doctoral students according to the "apprenticeship model." However, in the last one to two decades, this model has been questioned. Governments and higher education institutions (HEIs) reform doctoral education by…

This article aims at a better understanding of the role played by multilingualism and language in general in the process of scientific knowledge construction. By analysing various cases of multilingual communication in different universities and subjects (marketing, physics, law), we propose to focus on two parameters: the language regime and the…

Research in genetics and genomics is advancing at a fast pace, and thus keeping up with the most recent findings and conclusions can be very challenging. At the same time these recent findings and conclusions have made necessary a reconceptualization of genes and heredity, both in science and in science education, beyond the mostly gene-centred…

With the assistance of the National Science Foundation, the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) convened a STEM Task Force, a diverse panel of scientists and university administrators, to help develop a set of recommendations on both policy changes and high-impact practices to improve the participation and success rates of…

The main theme of this paper concerns the persistent critique of Gilbert Gottlieb on developmental behavior genetics and my reactions to this critique, the latter changing from rejection to complete acceptation. Concise characterizations of developmental behavior genetics, developmental systems theory (to which Gottlieb made essential…

Bilingualism, commonplace throughout the world, is not well accepted or supported in many parts of the United States. Education policies and practices regarding bilingualism are often based on myths and attitudes rather than facts, despite scientific evidence on both the disadvantages and advantages of bilingualism. Based on a brief overview of…

We repeated the historical infra-red radiation experiments performed by Melloni, to investigate why, at the end of his life, he came to the conclusion that radiation from light and heat rely on the same basic principle, what has been translated as the so called unitary formalism. In doing so, we profited from a Master thesis on heat radiation and…

The release of the 2012 results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on December 3, 2012, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ([OECD], 2013) brought about another round of public education fear mongering on the part of bureaucrats and policymakers. However, weaknesses with the PISA test design,…

My intention is to cast light on the characteristics of epistemic or fundamental research (in contrast to application-oriented research). I contrast a Baconian notion of objectivity, expressing a correspondence of the views of scientists to the facts, with a pluralist notion, involving a critical debate between conflicting approaches. These…

This article analyzes the concept of idealization in chemistry and the role played by pure substance and laboratory product. This topic has evident repercussions in the educational contexts that are applied to the science classroom, which are highlighted throughout the text. A common structure for knowledge construction is proposed for both…

The author contemplates the fate of Russian science in the light of the reforms that are going on today, and the requirements of bringing it into conformity with this country's traditions as well as with international practices. [This article was translated by Kim Braithwaite.]