Construction du concept du courant électrique à travers la démarche d’investigation comme mode de transportation didactique par les élèves des 4e années industrielles du Lycées technique industriel et commercial d’Ekounou.

Abstract

This work focuses on the construction of the concept of electric current in electricity in physics by students of the fourth year industrial of high schools and technical colleges in Cameroon. The literature review indicates that for more than two decades, several researchers in science education have shown that many students whose age varies between eight (08) and twenty-two (22) years old find it very difficult to understand the concepts of electricity, including the determination of current intensity in parallel and series circuits (Tiberghien, 2004). Indeed, the investigation method, invested as a transposition mode in this research oblige us to bring out this general hypothesis: “When the teaching of the electric current takes place under the prism of an investigative process as a method of didactic transposition into a classroom situation, it helps fourth year industrial students to perform better in the construction of this concept”. Using the steps of the investigative process, we made three secondary hypotheses. As a quasi - experimental, it took place with the students of the fourth year industrial of LTICE. We obtained a sample of forty students divided into two (2) equivalent groups: twenty (20) in the group following a teaching sequence with their teacher or normal class and twenty (20) in the experimental group. Firstly, we administered a pre-test to the two groups in order to collect their conceptions on the intensity of the electric current we record a percentage of 25,3% for the experiment group and 27% for the control group. Secondly, the experimental group underwent a test while the other group underwent usual teaching for the same duration. Subsequently, we admitted a post-test to see if the conceptions of the learners have evolved. The collection and the analysis of the post-test data in the two groups shows that the percentage of correct answers in the control group is 55%. On the other hand, in the experimental group, the percentage is 90%. In addition, all our secondary hypotheses were validated at the significance level α = 0.05 of the Student T-test of comparison of two independent samples, which led us to validate the general hypothesis of our research.