How to scaffold the students to design experimental procedures? A situation experienced by 108 high-school students

Patricia Marzin-Janvier (1) , Cedric d'Ham (1) , Eric Sanchez (2)

1 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble
2 INRP - Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique

This paper presents a proposition to improve the construction of concepts when doing experimental activities, and, in fact, to improve the construction of sense in experimental activities. This research involved 108, 17-18 year old students designing an experimental procedure for palaeontology learning. We first developed an analyse of the expert procedure and second, we realised a teaching sequence in which students were led to design an experimental procedure to measure the facial angle of a cranium. The purpose of this study is to address the following questions: (a) How do students write their experimental procedures in comparison with the expert procedure? (b) What sort of difficulties do they encounter? (c) What kind of scaffolding can we propose to guide them for writing their experimental procedure? Data sources of the study included students' written documents, audiotapes and videotapes. This paper aims at describing the research design and at giving some preliminary results of the study. (http://www.mna.hkr.se/~ll/eseraconf/Programme.htm)

Keywords: upper secondary school; inquiry; labworks

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Technology for Human Learning

Patricia Marzin-Janvier, Cedric d'Ham, Eric Sanchez. How to scaffold the students to design experimental procedures? A situation experienced by 108 high-school students. ESERA 2007, 2007, Malmö, Sweden. pp.203. ⟨hal-00190036⟩