“Bees are amazing, little creatures” (Richardson, 2017) – I agree. Bees have fascinated people since time immemorial, and yet even today there are still novel and fascinating discoveries (see the PLOS collection for some mind-boggling facts). Although bees as an insect species might seem as the prime example of state-building insects, highly social forms of community are the exception among bees. The large majority of all bee species are solitary bees or cuckoo bees that do not form insect states.

When citations are traded as the currency of science, it is difficult to estimate the price of a publication in advance or to understand it afterwards. One has the impression that precisely the topics that are frequently cited are those not in focus of one’s interest. In contrast, the work that one finds most interesting, might receive little attention. But maybe this perception is biased. To get a better understanding which articles are cited, I would like to give a short bibliometric evaluation of my google scholar citations in this post.

This is the second post in a series on a recent paper entitled “Age-related nuances in knowledge assessment” that we wrote with Luc Watrin and Oliver Wilhelm. The first post dealt with the way how we conceptualize the organization of knowledge in a hierarchy in a multidimensional knowledge space. The second post reflects on the way we measure or model knowledge. In textbooks knowledge assessments have a special standing, because they can be modeled both from a reflective and a formative perspective.

We published a new paper entitled “Age-related nuances in knowledge assessment” in Intelligence. I really like this paper because it deals with on the way we assess, model, and understand knowledge. And, btw, it employs machine learning methods. Thus, both in terms of content and methodology it hopefully sets a stage for future research avenues that are promising to follow up on. I would like to cover some of the key findings in a series of blog posts.

The article “Science Self-Concept – More Than the Sum of its Parts?” has now been published in “The Journal of Experimental Education” (btw in existence since 1932). The first 50 copies are free, in case you are interested. My first preprint. 😀Is a general science self-concept equivalent to an aggregated subject-specific science concept? It's about different modeling approaches, measurement invariance and concepts of equivalence. Check it out! Comment if you like: https://t.