CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF POPULARISATION DOCUMENTS IN THE PHYSICS CLASSROOM: AN ACTION RESEARCH IN GRADE 10

Critical work on popularisation resources is a widely recommended activity, one considered to motivate students and prepare them to be responsible citizens. This investigation explores the extent to which some activities aimed at this goal can be fruitfully organised in the classroom, in the course of an ordinary syllabus, at grade 10 level. Two expectations orientate our research: in this context, students presented with written popularisation documents would tend to limit their comprehension of the core message to what is directly connected with their syllabus; and they would not easily evaluate the respective importance - in terms of comprehension - of the implausible elements used in the document to facilitate its reading. After a preliminary investigation with teachers and students, a teaching-learning sequence was designed on the basis of our expectations, completed by the hypothesis that three specific aspects of students' learning processes would be mutually resonant in a “virtuous circle”. The implementation of this sequence for three successive years (Nt=94 students) with the same teacher provides stable results. Beyond analysing to what extent the outcomes support our expectations (to a rather large extent, in fact) we discuss the value of the elements within the “virtuous circle” to orientate the analysis of student learning processes in this type of classroom interaction.