Scientific Inquiry and Modelling for the Teaching of Earth Science. Contribution to the study of the place devoted to digital technology during a fieldwork course.

This work takes place in the intersection of two fields of the educational research : the didactics of sciences and the computerized learning environment for human learning. It relates to a socio-constructivist framework and aims at identifying the setting which is necessary so that students can be able to carry out a scientific inquiry during a fieldwork course for Earth science teaching.

We develop the view that the learning of science is an inquiry based process ; in other words, this process consists in linking, in the framework of problem solving, an empirical register - elaborated during fieldwork – and a scientific model considered as a “thinking tool”. We show that the question of instrumentation is a key question and that the benefit of the software that we have conceived relates to the fact that it mediates the interactions - eg. assists the students during the inquiry process - and allows the teacher to control the learning process. The computer based learning environments are, then, considered as tools which are constructed by the learners through their activity and participate in transforming the learning processes.

Key words : fieldwork course, scientific inquiry, modelling, computerized learning environment