Idées des élèves sur le hasard lors de discussions à visée philosophique

Abstract

The biological theory of evolution is fundamental knowledge for understanding modern biology. It is also a complex object of teaching regarding the nature of the knowledge at stake and pupils’ conceptions. Some pupils exclude the idea of randomness. This could constitute an obstacle toward an evolutionary thought. In this paper, we studied 10 to 12 years old pupils' capacity to speak about a complex subject, randomness. We introduced a qualitative data collection to identify the ideas of 2 groups of pupil on the randomness (K5 and K7), and their evolution during a collective discussion with philosophic aim. The study shows that the DVP allows to collect a large number of ideas of the pupils. The pupils propose different meanings of the randomness. However, the majority doesn’t seem to take into account the idea of contingency, and yet an essential idea to understand the mechanisms of evolution. This research wants to explore the correlation between pupils’ conceptions of biological evolution and their ideas of randomness.