Abstractions et Apprentissage des Quantites Physiques

Abstract

In order to compensate the backwardness of the 7- to 13-year-old middle-class pupils from Dakar compared to the upper-class pupils, training tests are worked out for the acquisition of physical quantities. A double training - for operations and for contents - based upon pseudo-empirical abstraction enable them to make up for this backwardness. If the results of the 7-year-old children do not challenge Piaget's hypothesis of the primacy of the operatory factors, the results of the older children reveal an absence of horizontal time-lags. Once an operatory structure is initiated, there would be no discrepancy in the acquisition of the different physical quantities, but a correlative construction based upon mutual inferences from one content to the other.