Plentiful challenges present themselves to all learners as they ‘grow’. Those considered fortunate to enter Higher Education (HE) would next become inculcated into the ways of thinking and practice/s (WTP’s) that are in use in conventional HE, including in its examination systems. Whereas HE teaching and learning environments and practices should ‘scaffold’ to lessen the challenges facing learners who come with hopes of preparing themselves for developing Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) needed also for progressive science research and which university education should target, this remains very distant from what is happening in the design and delivery of university curricula and related assessments. Since learners may enter HE with preformed habits that are not so conducive to developing a “re-search” mentality, preparation for progressive research, specially for a sustainable future, becomes further challenging. Mitigating these challenges may require us to remove being limited to teaching our students to learn new subject-related research methods only, as is commonly done, but also to include explicitly disrupting ‘old’ WTP’s to make possible impactful new learning, which then make possible the ‘far-transfer’ of research skills to future research situations, yet unknown. For example, such an approach would make a ‘competent’ researcher in science to become a ‘good’ researcher in almost any field, even if yet unanticipated. Towards this end, the new educational curricula that are being developed include Social Emotional Learning aspects also. The Keynote will include a discussion of approaches, such as the above- mentioned, that can be used in curricula design and mapping to address learner-challenges for developing a progressive science research HE mindset and practices. It will draw extensively on the speaker’s experiences as a science researcher and on his lecturer training roles in several countries such as a Director of Academic Programmes of a high-ranked research-intensive university.