People systematically overlook subtractive changes and favor additive ones when reporting new ideas. In a first preregistered experiment conducted via the Prolific platform among French adults (N = 477), we replicated experiments 2, 3, and 4 in Adams et al.'s study. We replicated the overlooking of subtraction, as participants reported 1155…

Environmental education is becoming a growing area of interest in early childhood education. In France, more time is given to environmental education activities in the preschool curriculum. Yet, there is a risk of narrowing preschool environmental education only to carry out pro-environmental behaviours, without giving pupils the opportunity to…

This research traced the history of mathematics education in Haitian secondary schools from 1935 until 2015. While there is not much explicit historical evidence of how mathematics education evolved in Haiti, its development gave some insight into the history of mathematics education in a Caribbean country with a colonial past. One might ask,…

Understanding and constructing domain-specific external representations, such as kinematic diagrams, is an important goal of engineering education. International standards (ISO 3952-1) prescribe their format in terms of graphical elements in black and white and two dimensions. However, during training, the canonical format is often modified under…

This article focuses on the case study of the concept of covalent bonding for 10th grade pupils in France. On the basis of their conceptions and difficulties, didactical engineering has been established that should lead to an improvement in the understanding of this concept. After analyzing the pupils' difficulties, we reflected on the…

Numeration units (ones, tens, hundreds, etc.) are an epistemological foundation for place value. Here, we assume that they are a didactic support in countries where spoken numbers are incongruent with written numbers. In France, teaching practices neglect the relations between units, and numeration units are typically used only to designate the…

Background: Many researchers have investigated student reasoning in Newtonian mechanics. In 1979 Viennot revealed that most students associate the concept of force with the velocity or acceleration of a motion. Forty years later, student understandings remain a major challenge for teachers. The implications of this challenge are still unclear,…

In this article, we describe the main phases in the development and validation of a questionnaire measuring secondary students' teleology and essentialism conceptions in the context of genetics. The validation process involved 714 Swiss and French secondary school students from 14 different schools. The process included interviews, several pilot…

The experiment that we present in this paper explores the teaching of Galilean motion principles observed in different reference frames, in an astronomical context. All grade 10 students in a French high school (the lycée Condorcet, Val de Marne) participated in two successive teaching-learning sessions, designed within the theoretical framework…

This study researched the use of metaphor among students and teachers to determine the images they had in their minds regarding a specific set of developed countries, and in doing so, utilized a longitudinal design carried out over four stages between November 2015 and November 2018 within a large metropolitan city in Turkey. The study findings…

Over the last forty years of mathematics education research, a coherent body of knowledge has accumulated regarding the teaching of limits. On this basis, it remains a challenge to identify goals and design tasks compatible with ordinary teaching conditions. This paper reports on a teaching experiment carried out in France with year 12 students,…

This paper examines the existence and impact of theoretical mathematical foundations on the teaching and learning of whole numbers in elementary school in France. It shows that the study of the New Math reform--which was eventually itself replaced in the longer term--provides some keys to understanding the influence of mathematical theories on…

The aim of the present study was to gain an insight into French young people's conceptual development regarding the greenhouse effect. Because this effect cannot be directly manipulated, we can assume that its conceptualization is mainly shaped through the sharing of information. Eighty French students from Grade Seven through to adulthood…

In many situations, the change in the conceptual understanding of students is measured using a single question. This is, for instance, the case in peer instruction where students answer twice to the same questions, before and after the discussion phase. Using item response theory and assuming that students proficiencies are normally distributed,…

The purpose of this research was to discover the conceptions of information literacy (IL) prevalent across multiple stakeholder groups in an international middle school community. The research involved students, parents, teachers, librarians, IT personnel, administrators and leadership in recorded focus group discussions. Using a phenomenographic…