The French school system was constructed on the ground of an egalitarian model i.e. one that observes the unity of action, time and place (one class, one master, one knowledge). The diversification of the population, growing distance between some of its categories and the traditional school culture focused the attention of the French education workers on the need of adapting this egalitarian model to the specific needs of these new categories of pupils. Therefore, in France now, we are observing an evolution of the culture of educational aids, consisting in the large diversification of its means, ways, duration and places where they are applied, tuned to the personalized needs of pupils. This is a real change of the paradigm.

   Since the beginning of the school year 2008/2009 we have seen new kinds of different aids appearing on each level, from pre-schools to high schools. These new and personalized aids are modular and desynchronized from the collective classroom time. They are applied only to pupils presenting learning difficulties and they take two hours per week.

   As the groups obtaining these aids are formed according to the principle of the homogeneity of pupils’ learning results (which are low), we observe that the pupils assigned to these groups  have mostly very similar socio-cultural origins. If we take into account the fact that the time of personalized aid is desynchronized from the didactic classroom time (Toullec-Théry, 2006), the question arises: aren’t these pupils finally excluded one more time, now from the inside (Bourdieu, 1993)?

   We have worked in the frame of TACD (Theory of the Conjoint Action in Didactics)

(Sensevy & Mercier, 2007) and we have constructed a model, based on the notion of a game, a model that allows us to understand and explain the didactic action in real situations: the learning game /epistemic game system. The learning game consist of the unities of construction of the knowledge step by step in the context of a lesson. The researcher pinpoints the different steps in the course of action which make it possible for the teacher and the pupils to construct the knowledge together (Marlot, 2008). The epistemic games (Santini, 2009) are identified by the analysis of the learning games actually played in the class. They represent, therefore, the knowledge that is aimed at in the didactic action in progress. The notion of distance (Santini, 2009) and of coherence between the learning games and the epistemic games allows us to understand how much the strategies used by pupils in order to “win” in the learning games are pertinent to the achievement of the epistemic games that are aimed at. This notion of distance makes measuring the efficiency of practices possible.

   Finally, the important notion of adequacy (Sensevy, 1998; Tambone and Mercier, 2003) allows us to investigate the notion of fairness in the didactic interactions. Do the new means of school aid allow pupils in difficulty to gain in adequacy and therefore to approach the standard school culture?

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