International research suggests that the success of re-entering school for cancer survivors is multifactorial. The quality of the school-family-hospital liaison and the promotion of social links between the child with cancer and his or her classmates appear to be central points. In France, the schooling of children with cancer is not frequently…

Young children, who are exposed to Latin script letters, experience difficulties in distinguishing between the reversible letters b and d and may therefore transform b into d (and vice versa). When children begin to write, in cultures with left-to-right writing/reading systems, they also often turn Arabic digits in the direction of…

Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

Research on the self-evaluation bias of students' school competence has focused mainly on its correlates for students' school adaptation. This study focused on teachers' theories about students with a positive or negative bias in their self-evaluation of competence. French students enrolled in the third and fifth grades of elementary school…

Little is known about whether manipulatives can support children's inferences of the mathematical structure of word problems. The objective was to test the effects of using manipulatives during problem solving on students' understanding of the additive relationships in word problems. Third and fifth graders (N = 45) solved one-step addition and…

This paper discusses the relevance of using physical situations to introduce the concept of angles at elementary school. We compare the effectiveness of two geometry teaching sequences. In the first one (physical sequence), the pupils learned the angle concept by experimenting on the playground (i.e. mesospace) and then modelling the situation. In…

We studied the effect of the number and characteristics of siblings (sex, age) on school achievement in several grades (kindergarten, first grade, and fifth grade), in two large French cohorts, with more than 16,000 children. Running linear mixed-effects models, we find that, independently of socioeconomic status, having more siblings is…

Learning to spell is a difficult but essential task for children learning to read. Several spelling tasks involving different cognitive demands are used in classroom. To provide better guidance for teaching practices, a critical question is whether spelling performance of beginner readers is task dependent. The present study focuses on the…

In the present study, we aimed to disentangle the impact of bilingualism and socioeconomic status (SES) on literacy in language-minority bilingual children (LMBC) and monolinguals exposed to French. We also wanted to explore the role of these two factors on cognitive and language skills, i.e., verbal knowledge (VK), morphosyntactic comprehension…

This essay presents the French educational programme 'Ecole et cinéma' in terms of its guiding principles. By examining the history of its creation, as well as the various levels at which this complex programme operates -- from government agencies to pupils, by way of educators and organizational leadership -- we begin to understand the…

False memories are well established episodic memory phenomena. Recent research in young adults has shown that semantically related associates can be falsely remembered as studied items in working memory (WM) tasks for lists of only a few items when a short 4-second interval was given between study and test. The present study reported two…

Educational apps can help children develop their early numeracy skills, but only if they incorporate certain pedagogical features. AppLINOU is an early numeracy app that was co-designed by a multidisciplinary team to be compatible with the way numeracy is taught in France's preschools. This study of whether incorporating AppLINOU into classroom…

In this article, we compared French and Cameroonian schoolchildren's initial conceptions and comprehension of the night and day cycle in order to test for cultural influence. Forty students aged almost 8 years (Grade 2) were individually interviewed in their schools about night and day dynamics before they had received any teaching in astronomy.…

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…

The aim is to examine the impact of interventions on fluency and reading comprehension and how the effects of these interventions depend on the time that teachers spend with children with reading difficulties. Two groups were involved: an experimental group (n = 600) trained in code-related skills and a control group (n = 597) that received no…