Aims

- to develop the students' ability for critical analysis towards educational researches (relevance of the themes, methods, epistemological bases, strictness in the results analysis, accuracy of the interpretations, etc.) and their contribution in the field work;
- to develop the ability for information retrieval;
- to introduce the students to various currents of research in educational sciences and to go further into some of the themes tackled.

Main themes

General thinking about the research in educational sciences: fields, aims, methods, epistemological bases, limits, links with the founding themes.
Presentation and critical discussion of some late researches in various fields of educational sciences (psychological, comparative, sociological, economical, philosophical, historical, political approaches).
The following themes will be tackled: learning, transfer and motivation in a training context, social interactions, cultural and community aspects, individual differences (cognitive styles and strategies for learning and auto-regulation), evaluation practices, development of educational and curricula devices, comparisons of educational systems (ex. teaching levels, base education, training of the teachers, training for adults, technical and occupational training, equity and efficiency of the systems)

Content and teaching methods

The course will be built up each year around some of these main themes, which could be different from year to year.
Methods :
- in-class sessions: these themes will be tackled from the analysis of real of fictive cases (testimonies, video documents, written cases), in order to arouse a critical discussion on the contribution of the researches and their relevance for the practice. The courses will consist of lectures, questions/answers sessions based on the home readings, analysis of case studies.
- group works: these sessions aim to develop the ability for critical analysis of educational situations, the hypotheses research and the sharing of the drawn tracks, from the comparison of the various researches studied. It will also help a training in information retrieval.
- personal work: the students will have to study more thoroughly one question related to one of the presented themes. They will have to look for relevant papers, to analyse these researches and to produce a written summary.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

The two courses Educational sciences 1 and 2 will be given by the same pool of professors and will thus be linked.
Written exam + personal work
Summary of the contributions during the sessions, research papers in the themes studied, a general bibliography.

Other credits in programs