Département de Physique et des Sciences Appliquées, Section des Sciences et Technologies, Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Mbanza-Ngungu, Mbanza-Ngungu, Kongo Central, RD Congo
This study aims at demonstrating that secondary school teachers of physics, in two sub-divisions of Mbanza-Ngungu, still provide teaching materials in both sub-divisions of Mbanza – Ngungu foresee didactic materials in their planning sheets. Hower, these materials are not always adequate to the lesson objectives and the conditions of their exploitation. Their physical existence is a problem, too.
Thus, by a technique of investigation with the teachers of the region of Mbanza-Ngungu, by interposed audio-visual recordings, we identified, thanks to an observation grid, through the notion of electricity taught in 3rd Scientific, the existence and the nature of the didactic material, the moments and the conditions of its exploitation in order to improve the didactic action of the teachers of this class.
In this study, based on a sociogenetic approach involving 7 teachers and 182 fourth-year scientific students from 21 schools offering the scientific section in Inkisi and Kimpese, two cities in the Kongo Central province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the central question focused on identifying the main initial representational obstacles in kinematics among these students and their origins. As a result, it was noted that most teachers were unaware of these initial representations. In addition, the students had primitive, negative and collective conceptions, stemming from educational and cultural contexts, relating to the basic notions of kinematics such as motion (moving), time (duration), trajectory (distance), speed (rapidity), rectilinear motion (movement on a flat surface), uniform motion (fixed), varied motion (accelerated) and free fall (falling suddenly and involuntarily). There is thus a persistent and evolving contradiction between these initial representations-obstacles and the new knowledges that teachers have to transmit.