Le cycle de vie du Cerisier : une narration « scientifique » ?

Abstract

The life cycle of the Cherry tree : a scientifîc narration ? Élisabeth BAUTIER, ESCOL, Danièle MANESSE, INRP, Brigitte PERTERFALVI, INRP, Anne VERIN, INRP. Within the context of a piece of research into the forms and functions of written work in science, this article proposes to observe behavioural patterns in writing used spontaneously by pupils in 6ème (Year 7) when given a scientific type instruction in a non-scientific framework. We were able to do this thanks to the national tests which are given to Year 7 pupils each year. In 1997, this evaluation included an item which required the pupil to translate a scientific diagram outlining the life cycle of the Cherry tree into a written account of this same process. The pupils were thus asked to produce a sort of "scientific" narration, the différent stages of which had to be linked together. Firstly, we examine the difficultes and the ambiguities of the task, the criteria which must be met in order for work produced by a pupil to be considered a "success" scientifically speaking, which therefore makes it different from a traditional type of narration, such as pupils produce in French. Next, we examined the work produced by a class of pupils from a school in an Educational Priority Area, the main elements of which are included in this paper ; this enabled us to identify différent behavioural patterns in writing, reflecting différent "positions" in the relationship to scientific knowledge.