Context of this study

In recent years, French lower, high schools and university programs have explicitly suggested adding problem solving to other teaching methods. Problem solving is promoted as contributing to the scientific training of pupils, by drawing on the variety of their knowledge. The successive reforms of science education curricula and associated teachers practices since 2005 prompt us to re-examine research results disseminated among French teachers (Boilevin & Dumas-Carré, 2001) and theoretical approach to understand students activities and help teachers to design teaching sequences on the basis of research results.

This led to the creation of a research project, bringing researchers from different disciplines and teachers, from secondary school to university, to collaborate. This collaborative project, initiated in 2016, aims to highlight how problem solving in physics at secondary school, high school and university contributes to the appropriation of concepts. 

Introduction

This study focuses on an activity proposed to middle school students in a collective resolution of sound propagation problem, and considers the influence of fictional elements during the problem-solving process. This approach was chosen by the teacher to be closer to daily knowledge of students and to help them to solve the problem. The session begins with a short clip of Star Wars II (Lucas, 2002). The clip shows Obi-Wan, speaking with his droid, traveling through an asteroid field in his spaceship. The view changes and students become a spectator outside the ship. The ship performs flying feats to avoid hitting the asteroid with a high speed. There is no noise. The largest block then receives the "seismic charge" dropped by the spacecraft. The explosion produces an intense blue light. The sequence ends before the asteroid fragments. The movie clip is shown three times to the students. After which the teacher distributes a document composed of four parts: instructions, description of the macroscopic and microscopic properties of the states of matter, description of the ear as a signal receiver and an experimental activity in which to the students are invited to place the flame of a candle in front of the loudspeaker of a speaker playing music.

Theoretical frame

The story is conceived as a tool enabling the student to rethink his experience of the world, through an alternative temporal experience: fiction (Doležel, 1998; Ricoeur, 1990). We consider the concept of "world" as a space in which the teacher and students are invited to enter and that is operated with its own laws. We use Lewis's (Lewis, 1978) theory of possible worlds to explain how these worlds are constructed and function, and to compare the fictional world to real world. This enables us to question divergent interpretations or explanatory systems in real world and fictional world, as well as basic elements of these worlds (for instance, is space filled with air in Star Wars?).

We consider the activity of problem-solving as a research activity based on a set of scientific and non-scientific knowledge (Dumas-carré & Goffard, 1997). Modeling is defined as the search for relationships between objects, phenomena and concepts, laws that enable to explain interpret and predict these phenomena (Bécu-Robinault, 2004; Tiberghien, 1994). Modeling involves to distinguish and articulate two levels: the one of objects and events and the one of theories and models. The first consists of descriptions of material objects and perceptible events - scientific or from everyday life. Explanations and predictions come either from scientific theories and models, or naïve (daily-life) theories. This approach helps to understand how students use concepts and models to study a real or fictional situation.

We will examine how the movie clip is considered by the teacher and the students during the problem-solving task. Through traces of interactions and associated written productions the objective of our analyses is to highlight the role of objects, events, physical models elaborated or mobilized in possible worlds. Our corpus is made up of school curricula, the textbook used by students and teacher, Star Wars II clip movie (Lucas, 2002), written productions of students, teacher and students post-task survey, excerpts of four class videos and associated transcriptions. Four possible worlds have been identified. We produced four analyzes involving each time an a priori analysis of theories and models in physics mobilized in the world and a characterization of knowledge at stake in the situation or mobilized by students. As results, heuristic maps of the concepts involved to explain the phenomena studied have been elaborated. - The world of Star Wars fiction, which is, by definition, incomplete (Doležel, 1998) and complex. To describe it, we can only rely on the elements given by the narrative (Genette, 2007). We considered the natural laws shaping this fictional world. - The world of fiction in the extract chosen by the teacher. It corresponds to the world mobilized by students who are not familiar to the world of Star Wars. - The real student’s world: we analyze the knowledge contained in the experimental situation of the problem-solving exercise, with a candle in front of a speaker. It includes the experimental devices with which students interact in the classroom. - The academic knowledge world: we analyzed the teacher's objectives in terms of academic knowledge. This analysis is based on the official curriculum and on the textbook the teacher used to design his class situation. During problem-solving, students are intended try connect information given and academic or daily life knowledge. The contents of the heuristics maps are analyzed by relating them to the elements that are in the excerpts of transcribed interactions that we analyzed and the written productions collected. We highlight the elements that are common or different in the possible worlds either from the point of view of their material characteristics or from the point of view of their functioning and therefore of the events to be seen. In the end, we compared how the situation has led to the implementation of knowledge that is related to the expectations of the teacher.

The teacher chooses to use fiction as a daily situation to challenge his students and bring them to problem solving. The fiction shows students what is inaccessible in class: space. Our analyses revealed that, contrary to what the teacher told the students, the movie clip shown has been modified. The sound is muted as soon as the camera's point of view is external to the spacecraft. In addition, the clip ends in the middle of the asteroid explosion, which corresponds in the original film to when the explosion is strongest. This ignorance leads to a misunderstanding between them. Analysis of transcripts reveals that students have difficulty articulating and differentiating between real-world and fictional world models, especially when they refer to different sensory registers. In the movie clip, there is no evidence of air or vacuum between the asteroids. It’s the same in Star Wars original world, except that we can hear the ship’s engines. In the classroom experiment, students have already investigated that air is composed of gases. The proximity of fictional and real phenomena is not obvious. The experiment should allow students to mobilize physics or daily knowledge, to predict a real phenomenon. In the film and in the experiment, there are a number of elements that will be difficult to compare because neither the objects nor their behavior are identical. Fiction contains specific knowledge involving ways of thinking that do not necessarily correspond to the objectives of the curriculum. This result leads to wonder whether it is up to the class to take care of the inadequacy between the knowledge that can be or not built on fiction. Indeed, according to the theoretical frame underlying the design of problem-solving tasks in our research group, the description of the task must be based on students’ daily knowledge, including fiction.

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