L'Observation et l'interprétation chez les élèves du professionnel et du général au secondaire

Abstract

For some years, the objectives of the secondary school have advocated the acquisition of skills; this policy was based upon their educational potential for all future citizens whatever their choice of careers might be. Through this research we wished to determine whether the vocational students were as capable of observation and interpretation as the general students.

Among the recognized competencies, as instructional objectives, observation and interpretation captured our attention. We demonstrate how difficult it is to describe these skills since their behaviours overlap each other. On a spectrum of the principal skills according to their sequence in the development of the spirit of this investigation, we were able to demonstrate that observation and interpretation are at the extremes of this spectrum; this circumstance confers upon them more specific behaviours. By basing our study on the most frequent definitions of these two skills, we constructed two tests for their measurement. The coordinates of the tests are presented as well as the results for the vocational and general students at the eleventh and twelfth year levels. The vocational students appear to be less prepared for these skills; we are all the more certain of this interpretation given the test's reliability as indicated by the significant alpha on the item analysis.

Two hypotheses emerged from this research: first, the teaching of vocational students probably does not use investigative teaching methods as recommended for those subject disciplines where observation and interpretation prevail. In the second place, is the vocational stream made up of a majority of students with problems of all kinds? The prejudices concerning this group are well known and emanate from education administration as well as from the teachers themselves. We would support, then, a scientific verification of these findings before developing teaching techniques for the secondary level.