Jacques Crinon

The role of peer feedback in learning to write explanatory texts: why the tutors learn the most

French students in grades 4 and 5 in schools around Paris wrote explanatory texts in L1 following a lesson in the Life Sciences, four times over the course of the school year. Each session included written correspondence with another student; half the students (Group G1) made suggestions about ways to improve the drafts of the other half of the students (Group G2). All students then revised their text. The results show: (1) an improvement in the quality of the texts produced over the year, even at the first draft stage; (2) greater progress for the students who gave suggestions compared with those who received them; and (3) a fragility of the performance of the last writing session. The results are interpreted in light of the concepts of knowledge transformation strategy and dialogism. The ‘stepping back’ encouraged by adopting the role of tutor to a fellow student may have allowed Group G1 students to build knowledge about explanatory texts and better ‘orchestrate’ the different voices present in their texts. The difficulty of the last writing session, which required a conceptual transformation and a reorganisation of the information provided by the lesson, could explain the poorer performance observed in this session.

Les supports numériques pour enseigner, quels obstacles? Littératie numérique scolaire et pratiques enseignantes

This study questions the specificity of digital media for educational purposes and their use by primary school teachers. We hypothesize that teachers’ lack of attention to the specific aspects of school digital literacy reinforces learning inequalities. The study involved three Grade 5 classes. History class, conducted with the support of digital documents were filmed and analyzed. At the end of the sequence, we evaluated what they had learned. The results show that the tasks proposed to the students and the action of the teachers foster the search for specific information and the linear exploration of the web pages. The difficulties of computer manipulation also occupies a significant part of the time. Teachers did not gear their action towards explicating the objectives of the lesson and the cognitive strategies to be used to build historical knowledge. Moreover, using a digital document seems to increase the difficulty of keeping the learning objective as a thread of the sequence.

Étude linguistique de l’utilisation de la virgule dans trois supports d’apprentissage

Notre etude s’inscrit dans une approche linguistique de supports d’apprentissage en His- toire destines a des eleves de cours moyen 2 (5e annee). La ponctuation est susceptible de produire des e ets sur la lecture des eleves et nous nous sommes interesses a l’usage de la virgule, dont la valeur est soit syntaxique, auquel cas elle redouble l’articulation de la phrase, soit textuelle, auquel cas elle introduit des elements informatifs supplementaires et signale au lecteur la necessite de faire des inferences. Notre corpus, constitue d’un manuel papier de 1927, d’un manuel papier de 2005 et d’un site Internet institutionnel, permet d’observer la disparition de la virgule textuelle dans le sup- port numerique, qui va de pair avec un lissage du texte de savoir, rendant plus di icile la construction des relations logiques entre les informations.