Generic descriptions (e.g., 'girls are emotional') are argued to play a major role in the development of essentialist reasoning about social categories. Although generics are prevalent across languages, studies exploring if and how generic language leads to essentialism have almost exclusively been conducted in English-speaking communities and…

This conversation was prompted by a blog entry posted by Tim Dracup in January 2012. The subsequent e-exchange between Tim and Barry Hymer explored a number of issues central to the nature and aetiology of giftedness, confronting these issues from contrasting ontological and epistemological stances. As a result, their conversation includes…

As reported in an earlier article (Russell and McGuigan, 2014), with Nuffield Foundation support, the authors of this article have been exploring with a group of primary teachers the teaching and learning of evolution and inheritance, focusing on conceptual progression. The new National Curriculum for England requires learners to access knowledge…

How do we support the enthusiasm children show for biology in school? Unfortunately, lack of exciting practical work and boring biology lessons seem to make science less popular. As a senior lecturer in plant physiology at Karlstad University I have simplified experiments intended for students at university and then tested them on 10-11 year old…

Each new baby is scrutinised and their facial features and other characteristics catalogued against known family members. This is essentially a social process: the new family member is recognised and accepted into the tribe. However, people's genetic inheritance--the information in their DNA--is also a serious matter with the potential to…

The authors investigated the etiology of low mathematics performance in 7-year-olds in the context of normal variation. The lowest 15% were selected from a representative U.K. sample of 2,178 same-sex twin pairs rated by their teachers according to National Curriculum criteria in 3 domains of mathematics. Model-fitting analyses of mathematics…

In the wake of developments in France and the United States where early psychiatrists such as Pinel, Esquirol, Belhomme and Seguin advocated "moral treatment" of the insane and classified"idiots" and "imbeciles" as incurable though educable, the Revd C. E. Van Koetsveld initiated his "School for Idiots" in…

Profiles the work of Dr. Caleb Williams Saleeby, a late 19th-century propagandist for eugenics. Eugenics is a science that deals with the transmission of hereditary racial traits, coupled with a desire to use this for the elimination of social ills. Discusses Saleeby's work with the Eugenics Education Society. (MJP)