Problem solving tasks are one of the topics of investigation within the field of STEM and educational engineering involving children. However, young children have received much more little attention. Accordingly, this paper explores the issues discussed by preschool children during engineering activities. We focus on the issues participants discuss during three building problem solving proposed to preschool children at a kindergarten. The activities were audio-video recorded and the argumentative discussions were identified and transcribed. The argumentative analysis focused on different elements, such as the issuesoccurring in each argumentative episode, the standpoints, the arguments, and the argumentative structure. In particular, to explore the issues and their role in problem solving activities, three illustrative cases are presented. The findings show, from an argumentative perspective, a variety of issues explored by children in solving problems around building tasks. The task presented by the adult as a building activity represents something more for the participant children: for example, the children focus on the technical components to overcome possible obstacles, they refer to the collaboration with peers, to the possession of objects or to the utility of the working activities. As preschool children’s engineering work appears as a complex activity, the present study highlights the value of analyzing the issues that are discussed by preschool children during building activities.

This work shows the results of a research carried out in secondary school and university developing a co-disciplinary Research and Study Course (RSC) on questions connected to Physics and Mathematics in different groups. We present preliminary results of the RSC developed in three different groups: science education researchers, N=25 Mathematics teacher students (training teachers of Mathematics) at University, and N= 68 secondary school students. The development and scope of the RSC in each group is described by using the RSC components as defined by Chevallard’s Anthropological Theory of Didactics (ATD). Furthermore, a short description of the Praxeological Model of Reference is presented. This model was built by the researchers group in order to reply to the generative question, unknown in the beginning, and to anticipate and to conceive the evolution of the possible SRC in each institution. Some general results in each group are discussed and some conclusions concerning the ecology of the pedagogy of research and questioning the world at university and secondary schools are drawn.

This article presents findings with regard to mental models of the shape of the earth, location of people on earth and the day/night cycle, established on the basis of statements of 49 polish children aged from 5 to 8 years. During the interviews, the children made moving representations of the day and night sky and explained the position of and mutual relations between the earth, sun and moon using self-made plasticine models. The article establishes a high degree of similarity with the Vosniadou and Brewer models and states that children's astronomical knowledge mainly comes from extracurricular sources of information.

This paper analyses the pupil’s activity during a robotic educational sequence designed and conducted by the teacher in first grade class. Video recording are analyzed in order to characterize the activity of the pupils using instrumental approach. The analysis is focused on instrumental and conceptual geneses. It characterizes the social and instrumental mediations involved in these geneses. The study highlights the role played by graphic representations in the process of abstraction during learning of programming skills.

This study describes the first results of an exploratory study focused on the conditions of the task that could influence how grade 4 and 5 students represent energy chains. Three factors have been analyzed: the number of elements which composed the energy chain, the number of objects represented on each picture, and the type of object represented in the picture. A survey methodology was employed. The results show that each of the three factors has an impact on the success of students to represent complete energy chains. The impact of the type of objects was reproduced in a second survey.

In this paper, we present results about the conceptualization of the relativity of simultaneity and the operational invariants used by high school students. The Theory of Conceptual Fields is adopted to design, analyse and evaluate a didactic sequence to teach the basic aspects of the Theory of Special Relativity in secondary school. Only the situations related to the relativity of simultaneity are analysed here. An inductive categorization is constructed from 256 protocols generated in the implementations carried out in four 11th grade courses (15-16 years) (N = 128) in a public school of Colombia. The categorization identifies the resolutions of the students and the operative invariants that they use in each situation. The results indicate that the proposed situations would produce the emergence and awareness of the operational invariants linked to the relativity of Galileo, which would open the way to the conceptualization of the relativity of simultaneity in secondary school.

The objective of this study is to provide teachers with indicators to help them take into account the difficulties’ students face when performing tasks prescribed with a computer tool like the spreadsheet. Trying to identify these difficulties should allow teachers to better understand why students learn or not. We analysed the activity of 12 students from a professional course. The results of two representative students are presented in detail in this article as case studies. Finally, we propose to use these results for educational implications, results obtained from behaviours that could be identified in class by the teacher.

This paper presents a preliminary study of how French teachers organize themselves in community for producing online resources. We specifically focussed on the mechanisms allowing the creation and the sustainability of active communities, applying the ideas of Basurto and colleagues (2011). We considered several communities in French secondary education (in vocational schools, in documentation) and in primary education, studying what has been published on the web and leading interviews with teachers when it was possible. Our research has been exploratory. Its first results show the existence of continuous processes of creation and organization of communities having different philosophies, rules and policies of expansion.

The academic transition between school and university mathematics is challenging for many students, due to the nature of mathematics. This paper reports on the results of a study in which the Coping Styles Questionnaire (CSQ) was distributed to 186 first-year mathematicians. Barely-remarkable gender differences were found in students’ responses, which might suggest that gender stereotypes in mathematics may not be as extreme as many believe. Furthermore, findings suggest that questionnaires such as the CSQ could be used to identify students’ coping styles and consequently help them adopt effective coping strategies for the secondary-tertiary mathematics transition.

The use of statistics, and in particular exploratory data analysis, in educational research present interesting perspectives. However, it is also important to discuss its relevance and the meaning of the results obtained. As such, we propose a methodological discussion based on a study concerning the introduction of a shared teaching method in French curricula of biology-geology, technology and physics-chemistry. We made a survey by questionnaire to collect the representations of teachers from the tree school subjects related to inquiry based science education (IBSE). In this communication, we propose a comparative analysis of different types of exploratory data analysis used in our research in order to highlight the different representations of teachers regarding the use of IBSE depending on their subject. We bring out, in particular, some conditions necessary in the design of a questionnaire that will be processed using principal component analysis and factorial discriminant analysis.