Teaching Science with Experimental Work and Computer Simulations in a Primary Teacher Education Course: What Challenges to Promote Epistemic Practices?

The objective of this work is to study how teachers’ mediation can promote the development of students’ epistemic practices (EPs), in a classroom environment, using computer simulations (CS) articulated with experimental work (EW). In particular, we want to explore characteristics of teacher mediation using CS articulated with EW as a didactical approach and what EPs occur when students work in the pathway from theory (T) to the observable-world (OW), and vice-versa. We report a multi-case study with two teachers of a primary teacher education course. We use multimodal narratives (a description of what happens in the classroom, using several types of data collected) to analyse the students’ EPs and the teachers’ mediation. This analysis is made using the qualitative analysis software (NVivo 8®).