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…

Information Visualisation strategies can be applied in a variety of domains. In the context of temporal networks, i.e., networks in which interactions between individuals occur throughout time, efforts have been conducted to develop visual approaches that allow finding interaction patterns, anomalies, and other behaviours not previously perceived…

Reading methods are valuable cultural and educational objects. They guide students into the world of the written word and, since the end of the nineteenth century, they have associated letters, sounds and words with illustrations. In French schools, in the reading methods published between 1880 and 1960, the word 'boxing' was often associated with…

Age-classes are a salient feature of modern schooling. Yet how did age-grouping come to prevail in entire school systems? And how was this form of grouping related to educational and pedagogic discussions at the time of its emergence? The article addresses these issues by looking at the historical context within which age classes came to a…

Lesson observation is frequently used in teacher induction programmes to support newly-qualified teachers in their reflection and classroom enquiry. This article uses an elaboration of Peirce's abduction to illustrate how the post-observation conversation supports a teacher's reflection on her teaching, and in particular, her teaching of language…

The pedagogies that are currently being put forward within a broad multilingual paradigm in languages education endorse the general principle that learning is a collaborative and dialogic process engaging learners and teachers as partners that bring diverse linguistic, cultural and other knowledge into the classroom. The plurilingual approach to…

Key studies in history education (from France and the USA) are discussed and compared in order to explore their methodological issues in terms of the types of knowledge they can generate about teaching and learning. An epistemological framework that relates the history of historians as an inquiry to that of the classroom provides the criteria for…

While policy debate is often focused on the whole teaching profession, primary and secondary teachers differ in more ways than one. While all countries require teachers to have at least a bachelor degree to enter the profession in primary or lower secondary education, the structure and content of the programmes vary and are less geared towards…

In view of the recent developments in many countries, for example, in the USA and in the UK, it appears that computer science education (CSE) in primary or secondary schools (K-12) has reached a significant turning point, shifting its focus from ICT-oriented to rigorous computer science concepts. The goal of this special issue is to offer a…

In "Why Knowledge Matters," influential scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr., addresses critical issues in contemporary education reform and shows how cherished truisms about education and child development have led to unintended and negative consequences. Hirsch, author of "The Knowledge Deficit," draws on recent findings in neuroscience…

Even when they have good language skills, many children with hearing loss lag several years behind hearing children in the ability to grasp beliefs of others. The researchers sought to determine whether this lag results from difficulty with the verbal demands of tasks or from conceptual delays. The researchers related children's performance on a…

The subject of this article is the structure and evolution of skills developed by pupils at primary level. Starting from an analysis of the panel data provided by the French Ministry of Education, the main object of this paper is an original measurement of skills using structural models. The findings of this research raise two complementary…

This article deals with evaluating an interactive learning environment (ILE) during the iterative-design process. Various aspects of the system must be assessed and a number of evaluation methods are available. In designing the ILE Ambre-add, several techniques were combined to test and refine the system. In particular, we point out the merits of…

The paper presents the language policies being implemented in French primary schools under the present educational reform and considers how they tackle the question of sociocultural and linguistic pluralism. It questions the choice of teaching one foreign language from a very early age at kindergarten rather than opting for a model of language…

The International Commission on the Teaching of Mathematics created by the International Congress of Mathematics at Rome, Italy, in 1908, submitted a large body of reports to the congress at Cambridge, England, in 1912. Those for the United States have been published as bulletins for the Bureau of Education. The material in this bulletin shows…