There are worries about the quality of scientific research, the validity of the knowledge it produces and the integrity of academics. What is lacking in the debate is what scientists have to say and what they do to create and safeguard what they see as 'good science'. Using Dutch academia as a case, we show that the academics' understandings of…

For over two decades now, the application of Citizen Science to Education has been evolving, and fundamental topics, such as the drivers of motivation to participate in Citizen Science projects, are still under discussion. Some recent developments, though, like the use of Artificial Intelligence to support data collection and validation, seem to…

In the past two decades, individual explanations of scientific misconduct ('bad apples') have increasingly given way to systemic explanations ('bad systems'). Where did this interest in systemic factors (publication pressure, competition for research funding) come from? Given that research ethicists often present their interventions as responses…

Background: Many different concepts have been invoked in the literature to describe coordination between scientific and policy practices. However, a framework to understand different types of this boundary management is lacking, which allows 'linear' models and 'gap' metaphors to persist. Objectives: To operationalise the multidimensional…

Promoting problem-solving in students is an important aim of secondary science education. There is a mismatch, however, between the complex, ill-structured nature of realistic scientific problems, versus the well-structured problems students are generally confronted with. The current study investigates a teaching-learning strategy that resolves…

Scientific reasoning refers to the thinking skills involved in conceiving and conducting an investigation. This study examined how proficiency in performing these skills develops during the upper-elementary school years. A sample of 157 children (age 7-10) took a performance-based scientific reasoning test in three consecutive years. Four distinct…

Secondary school students often only use the rules for doing scientific inquiry when prompted, as if they fail to see the point of doing so. This qualitative design study explores conditions to address this problem in school science inquiry. Dutch students (N = 22, aged 14-15) repeatedly consider the quality of their work: in a conventional,…

While quantitative performance indicators are widely used by organizations and individuals for evaluative purposes, little is known about their impacts on the epistemic processes of academic knowledge production. In this article we bring together three qualitative research projects undertaken in the Netherlands and Austria to contribute to filling…

Without any major changes, a pilot version of a physical science lab course was able to continue when the COVID-19 crisis necessitated the abrupt suspension of on-campus education. The 'Maker Lab' course, in which students conceive and set up their own experiments using affordable microcontrollers, required students to follow the entire arc of the…

Research and design activities are becoming more important in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and D&T (design and technology) education. Research and design are often taught separately from each other, while in professional STEM practices, many projects are neither 'research only' or 'design only'--they are both. In…

This study reports about biology undergraduates' writing in a course with genre-based writing instruction. The students read, analyse and synthesise research articles using the Scientific Argumentation Model (SAM), a tool to make explicit the characteristics of the research article genre. We explored to what extent 21 students make a synthesis…

The authors of the article describe the popular trends and methods as well as ICT tools used for the mapping and visualization of scientific domains as a research methodology which is attracting more and more interest from scientific information and science studies professionals. The researchers analysed Pajek, one of the programs used for the…

Since concepts may have different meanings in different contexts, students have to learn to recontextualise them, i.e. to adapt their meanings to a new context. It is unclear, however, what characteristics a learning and teaching strategy for recontextualising should have. The study aims to develop such a learning and teaching strategy for…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how and why personality tests are used in workplace training. This research paper is guided by three research questions that inquire about the role of external and internal stakeholders, the value of psychometric and practical considerations in test selection, and the purpose of personality test use…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons of the success of the Netherlands in knowledge valorisation: what are the actors that participate in knowledge valorisation process and what are their functions; what is the route of knowledge in valorisation; what "surplus value" does knowledge gain in the valorisation…