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Abstract. The oral narratives of 240 Italian children aged 3–8 years were analyzed using a new instrument, the Narrative Competence Task (NCT). The data showed a gradual increase in the children’s narrative competence in both the macrostructure and the microstructure. Statistically significant differences between preschool-age and school-age children were found on all the variables considered. In addition to increased chronological age, a significant role of cognitive abilities (general non-verbal intelligence and sequential reasoning) and linguistic skills (mean length of utterance and lexical diversity) emerged in explaining the variance in children’s narrative macrostructure. Children with superior cognitive and linguistic abilities produced richer narratives characterized by a greater quantity of information, a better structure, and a wider use of mental state lexicon.

This article aims to provide some elements relating to the boundaries of education, scientific popularization and research in didactics. This study focuses on greenhouse effect through the resources available on the internet and in textbooks. The students’difficulties relating to the understanding of greenhouse effect already identified permits the building of an images’ typology. In particular, «sequential reasoning» is a very resistant obstacle to combine the evolution of physical quantities during a transitory phase, i. e. an increase of temperature, and the instantaneity of the energy budgets. For both types of documents, our results highlight a wide spectrum of presentations, a strong presence of «echo explanations» and various strategies to bypass the aforegoing difficulties., Cet article vise à apporter quelques éléments relatifs à la délimitation des champs de l’enseignement, de la vulgarisation scientifique et de la recherche en didactique. Cette étude porte sur le thème de l’effet de serre au travers des ressources disponibles en ligne et de manuels scolaires, en accordant une attention particulière aux images présentées. Une typologie des images a été construite à partir des difficultés déjà repérées chez les élèves. La mise en oeuvre très fréquente d’un raisonnement de type séquentiel par les élèves ne leur permet que très difficilement d’allier évolution d’un phénomène, ici une hausse de température, et instantanéité des bilans, ici énergétiques. Nos résultats soulignent, pour les deux types de documents exploités, une grande largeur du spectre des présentations, une forte présence des «explications-écho» ainsi que diverses stratégies de «contournement» des difficultés., Colin Philippe. Enseignement et vulgarisation scientifique : une frontière en cours d’effacement ? Une étude de cas autour de l’effet de serre. In: Spirale. Revue de recherches en éducation, n°48, 2011. Transmettre les sciences : vulgarisation et enseignement, sous la direction de Johann-Günther Egginger. pp. 63-84.

Both sequential reasoning skills and listening text comprehension are complex abilities that have their major development stages during the preschool period. Theoretically, an association between these skills could have its origins in the script construct: the knowledge of how events develop in real life could lead to a better comprehension of temporal and causal relationships. This study addressed the existence of a specific association between children’s performance on a listening comprehension test and their performance on a picture arrangement task that was specifically developed for this project. The participants were 110 preschool children ranging in age from 3 to 6 years. The results show that children’s listening text comprehension ability is mainly explained by their lexical comprehension, but at 3 years of age, their competence in correctly arranging events in a sequential order plays a significant role in explaining children’s comprehension of textual information.

La principal dificultad que encuentran los estudiantes al acercarse a los equilibrios ácido-base múltiples es que precisan controlar varios equilibrios de forma simultánea. Una anticipación en la presentación a los estudiantes de educación secundaria de estos equilibrios induce a la utilización del razonamiento causal secuencial, por el cual se consideran los procesos no como equilibrios sino como compartimentos estanco (sin simultaneidad) y cada proceso como consecuencia del anterior y como causa del siguiente. En el presente artículo, por un lado, diagnosticamos las concepciones alternativas relacionadas con los equilibrios ácido-base múltiples (estudiantes universitarios, licenciados-opositores a la educación secundaria y libros universitarios); y por el otro, se centra en una propuesta de mejora del aprendizaje utilizando para ello la resolución de problemas y el ordenador como recurso auxiliar en esta resolución. Previamente analizamos los enunciados de los problemas que se plantean en algunos libros universitarios como punto de partida a nuestra propuesta didáctica, la cual se centra en que los estudiantes expliciten todos los equilibrios presentes en los procesos ácido-base múltiples como parte de una heurística para la resolución de los problemas y utilicen el ordenador para salvar las dificultades matemáticas primando el análisis del proceso químico. The need to control several equilibria simultaneously is the main difficulty met by students when they approach multiple acid-base equilibria. Presenting beforehand these equilibria to secondary school students encourages the use of causal sequential reasoning that takes processes not as equilibria but isolated, without simultaneity, each process being the cause of the former and causing the following. In this article, on the one hand we diagnose the alternative conceptions related to multiple acid-base equilibria. On the other hand we propose to improve learning by using problem solving and the computer as an auxiliary resource. We previously analyse the wording of the problems presented in some university textbooks as starting point to our didactic proposal, which asks the students to explain all the equilibria in multiple acid-base processes as part of a heuristic for problem solving and to use the computer to solve mathematical difficulties, giving priority to the analysis of the chemical process.