International audienceA major part of studies about students' conceptions and conceptual change exclusively is based on the analysis language, which is treated as a tool to make private contents of mind public to researchers. Following recent studies that focus (a) on language and discursive practice and (b) on the pragmatics of communication that draws on talk, gestures, and semiotic resources in the setting, we propose a redefinition of the nature of conception. Conceptions are understood as the simultaneously available speech, gestures, and contextual structures that cannot be reduced to verbal rendering because gestures and contextual structures constitute different modalities in the communication. Drawing on data collected during a physics unit about gas taught in French tenth-grade classrooms, we show why an appropriate account of conceptions requires (a) gestures simultaneously produced with talk and (b) identification of the relevant structures in the setting used by the participants as meaning-making (semiotic) resources. We propose to (a) reconceptualize the notion of conception by defining an "idea" as consisting of all relevant semiotic (meaning-making) resources publicly made available by a speaker (talk, gesture, context) and (b) consider conceptual change through the temporal evolution of ideas defined in this manner

International audienceIn 1991, an international workshop held in Bremen was working on " Research in Physics Learning-Theoretical Issues and Empirical Studies " (Duit, Goldberg, Niedderer 1992). The intention of this workshop was to develop a new research goal, which was to study learning processes with data from during the learning process. The main point, which often makes learning process studies very important and interesting is the following: Students' actual constructions are often different from taught knowledge. In other words: there is a gap between what we teach and what is learnt (McDermott 1991), the knowledge to be taught is different from students' steps of learning (Tiberghien 1997). The students undertake a cognitive development, which leads them towards constructing certain "intermediate conceptions" (see below) corresponding to their cognitive structure (Niedderer 2001). In this paper, we are presenting some theoretical and methodological issues together with some results from new studies (Givry 2003; Budde 2004). 2. Theoretical framework Conceptions and expressed ideas Many authors use the term "conception" to denote their basic concept of thinking and learning (see Duit 2004). A conception is seen as a hypothetical set of statements, skills, procedures, that the researcher attributes to one or more students in order to account for students' behaviour in a set of given situations (Tiberghien 1997). Here, we distinguish between two cases: (1) One is to consider that a conception intends to be part of modelling students' mind. It is a construction of a researcher to describe typical use of elements of knowledge and ways of thinking of students. A conception has to be stable and must appear in more than one context and point in time. (2) The other is to consider that the researcher infers only ideas, which are expressed in the students' productions without making hypotheses on students' mind (Givry and Roth in press). These inferences will be called " expressed-ideas " to distinguish them from the previous approach. These two approaches show that, even if the points of view on the students' mind modelling are different, the analysis and the results on learning are compatible and mutually reinforced. Both approaches are inferred from students' productions (utterances, gestures, writing) by the researcher and can show some stability over time (Niedderer 2001) and through several situations (Givry 2003). The set of these situations represent their domain of validity, this domain can be reduced to a single situation or be stable in several situations. In both cases there is a construction of a researcher, which describes the core of several ideas of students in the researchers own words using the most distinctive features of those ideas for this description. This procedure is also aiming at a considerable reduction of data, describing the core of a set of ideas in a set of situations with one conception. Learning processes Often, learning processes 1 can be represented as a sequence of conceptions dev...

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41 Damien GIVRY AbstractThis study deals with students'diffictulties during the learning of the concept of mass in school. In order to better understand these difficulties, we have studied the history of this concept and analysed curiccula. After this work, we have elaborated a questionnaire, that we proposed to students from the juniorhigh school to the universityand to high school teachers. Questionnaire analysis shows conceptions and obstacles concerning the concept of mass during the different stages of teaching and allows us to see their evolution.

An integrated science and technology teaching program has been developed in French lower secondary school for six years. It follows the national reviews of science and technology education at primary level which ambition is to propose an education for all that might change students attitude toward science and technology and the way it is taught. This program encourage different teachers to define together teaching sequences that integrate their respective subject (biology-geology, physics-chemistry, technology). Such program questions the place and role of the teachers taking part in the program. Three dimensions (educational goals, operational, organizational) have been adapted from Hasni et al. (2008) in order to grasp the complexity of the integrated teaching program and its specific issues. The analysis of posters where teachers present the result of their work shows an evolution of their orientations. In the teachers perspective, the integration no longer seams a goal in itself but a mean to motivate students and to address questions linked with their environment.