New Perspectives in Science Education

Communication can be understood as the set of relations between two people interacting. Between learners and teachers, the relationship is induced by a situation of communication teaching-learning.

In this constructivism theory, Chevallard and Charlot make the hypotesis that learning requires a factor commonly underestimated: the “relation with learning”. This study surveys the impact of the “relation with learning” of pupils under a situation of communication teaching-learning. The evolution of conceptions among learners had been studied in parallel of pedagogical method proposed by teacher.

The necessity to change the conceptions in scientific learning is claimed by Giordan’s allosteric model and KVP model of Clement.  

We surveyed and compared qualitatively a population of primary school pupils (n = 24), high school pupils (n= 25), and university students (n= 20) about a usual topic (blood circulation). One questionnaire enabled to determine a set of relations with learning profiles. Besides, another questionnaire for identifying the conceptions was distributed one month before the learning sequence (phase 1), and again one month after the learning sequence (phase 2) and once again six months after the learning sequence (phase 3). In parallel, the pedagogical method for each teaching sequence were defined using Bell criteres.

Our first results show that two factors are correlated, like shown in our quantitative last research on gymnasium pupils: utilitarian profile (U) and pleasure profile (P) both improve in the short run the evolution of the scientific conceptions in phase 2. Moreover, these data show same results for phase 3 for primary school pupils, university students and partly for high school pupils. Nevertheless, few conceptions decline between phase 2 and phase 3, specially for high school and primary school pupils. Analysis of different pedagogical methods used in this study shows that inquiry methods proposed for primary school and high school pupils and transmissive/explicit method proposed for university students are not correlated with a better elaboration of conceptions.  Moreover, university students have more elaborated their conceptions in phase 3 than other scholar pupils.

We can propose that independantly of pedagogical methods, “resonance” of learner with learning defined in partly by his “relation with learning” would be an important factor to create good conditions of communication under a situation teaching-learning.