Les représentations graphiques dans l’enseignement et l’apprentissage de l’electricité

The teaching of basic electricity uses many circuit diagrams. We present in this paper several experiments which show that no specific teaching about the decoding and understanding of the graphical information contained in these diagrams in made in class. On the contrary teaching reinforces the role of certain types of diagrams (canonical ones) which contribute to the organisation of students’ knowledge in the, form of prototypes. Thus diagrams become autonomous objects unrelated to concepts of electricity they are representing. We will present some experiments in the area of learning about electricity which aim at changing the usual classroom practices. They take into account the naive conceptions of students. Within this framework, graphical representations are used as a support for learning concepts of electricity.