USE OF A COMPUTER TOOL IN SCIENCE TEACHING TO SUPPORT THE DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS

Résumé En

The computer supported environment LabNbook has been proposed to high school and university teachers to support the production of experimental reports or lab notebooks by students. Our focus is on activities where students have to design experiments including a formalisation part through the writing of the experimental protocol. LabNbook provides a protocol editor, Copex, to support students in this formalisation of their experiment. We investigate the pedagogical strategies developed by teachers to make students write protocols using the Copex tool. Forty-nine activities from twenty-one teaching units are analysed. While some teaching units do not spend much on the writing of the protocol, various creative strategies are proposed by the teachers with Copex. An insight on the use of Copex by students shows that the spontaneous use of Copex by the students for writing a protocol is encouraged by the value teachers give to the writing of the protocol and to the use of Copex, in previous activities. Two teachers' interviews show that the structuring power of the writing of the protocol supported by Copex, is used in particular to make students structure their work and thus better understand and connect, the strategy and the details of the experiment.