Students' adaptation to a new situation: the design of an experimental procedure

Isabelle Girault (1) , Cedric d'Ham (1) , David Cross (1)

1 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble

Different studies (Arce and Betancourt, 1997; Séré, 2002) emphasize the importance of the task of experimental procedure design in a learning context. However, the required design is a difficult task for students (Séré and Beney, 1997). Consequently, students are hardly ever allowed to design their own experiment. The study by Tiberghien et al. (2001) showed that “to learn how to plan an investigation in order to address a specific question or problem” was the least frequent process objective. Although this paper does not focus on direct learning gains, there are reasons to believe that design activities contribute to learning (Hmelo et al., 2000). During a labwork session, students were asked to design an experiment. The aim of this research is to analyse the changes in the students' activity when they have to design an experiment and observe how they handle with these changes. In this paper we will first characterize the situation and then analyse the adaptation to this new situation.

Keywords: chemistry; experimental procedure design; labworks

Domains: Technology for Human Learning

Isabelle Girault, Cedric d'Ham, David Cross. Students' adaptation to a new situation: the design of an experimental procedure. ESERA 2007 (European Science Education Research Association), 2007, Malmo, Sweden. 3 p. ⟨hal-00190045⟩