Obstacles and the building of didactic situations in experimental science , Jean-Pierre Astolfi Brigitte Peterfalvi
Helping pupils to overcome the epistemological obstacles they run into is one of the basic challenges of “constructivist" science teaching. How should this kind of teaching be conceived ? The actions to be taken are necessarily oriented by certain characteristics of these obstacles : their transversal character, the way they appear In a network of ideas creating a system, and resist reification. Because of them, not too much can be expected of a single specific didactic mode of teaching.
Different strategies are possible, but they must all be flexible enough to allow pupils to Invest In their own ideas, and firmly directed enough to guarantee that the concept to be constructed is not lost sight of.
Les recherches en didactique (y compris celles de didactique des sciences) appartiennent au champ des sciences humaines. Les méthodologies qu'elles mettent en œuvre se doivent d'être adaptées à cette situation et ne peuvent s'organiser autour de la seule administration de la preuve. Mieux vaux, en effet, s'efforcer de distinguer des types pluriels de recherches possibles, en définissant précisément dans chaque cas la nature de leurs « objets trouvés ». Cet article caractérise ainsi trois paradigmes contrastés, respectivement dits « pragmatique » (organisé autour du possible), « herméneutique » (organisé autour du sens) et « nomothétique » (organisé autour de la preuve), sans prétendre à l'exhaustivité. Ces paradigmes n'ont pas vocation classificatoire mais fonctionnent plutôt comme grilles d'analyse ; on propose ici de les appliquer à l'évolution des recherches en didactique des sciences, conduites à l'INRP.
Teaching strategies for tackling conceptual obstacles and their dynamic principles
There are many different teaching strategies for confronting conceptual obstacles. These strategies are not limited to approaches that aim to present students with logical contradictions of their ideas or that use pre-defined activities to help them progress through crucial reasoning processes. In this article, we report the results of classroom-based research concerning the teaching of the transformation of matter in biology and chemistry courses. Among the variety of teaching strategies that were trialed, we selected four of them because of their constrasting approaches and differences in their logical basis. After describing them, we characterise different dimensions that have proven useful for their analysis and identify a number of dynamic principles that hold promise as ways to tackle conceptual obstacles in the classroom.
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