L' enquête formative

Une proposition de modélisation de l’activité évaluative lors de séances de production écrite au CP en France

Abstract

This contribution, based on a doctoral research, first discusses the issue of formative assessment. Faced with the difficulty of apprehending it empirically, it prefers, initially, the notion of assessment activity. In a situated assessment perspective (Mottier Lopez, 2008), assessment activity will be conceptually defined by a unit called a valuation (Dewey, 2011), linking apraisal and evaluative judgement. Defined in its components by drawing on the concerns of evaluative theories (notably the relationships between referee, referents, evaluative judgements) and the Course of Action (Thereau, 2004), this continuum emerges from moment to moment and constitutes an uninterrupted flow. This flow of valuations will be used to understand the activity of three teachers with three students in difficulty in their classes during writing sessions at the Cours Préparatoire (CP), in France. The sessions were filmed and transcribed in full. The teacher was then confronted with her own activity. These two elements (transcription and self-confrontation) allow the construction of data, the analysis of which will be illustrated here through an emblematic example. In conclusion, a model of the assessment activity will be presented. This model is called a formative inquiry, in reference to Dewey's inquiry (1993), in which the teacher, faced with a disturbed and then problematic situation, implements means to return to a writing situation. This inquiry is ultimately claimed to be formative since it involves the student's participation in a construction of shared meaning.