Le contrat didactique: un cadre interprétatif pour comprendre les savoirs manifestés par les elèves en mathématique

This article describes the dynamic inherant in the didactic relation involving the teacher, the pupil and knowledge. Its purpose is to demonstrate the pertinance of analysing pupils’ actualizations of knowledge using the concept of «didactic contracts». In order to specify the nature of didactic contract, this concept is compared to the notion of exerimental contract between an experimenter, a subject and scholastic knowledge. This analysis draws on empirical examples from experimental situations organized either in the classroom (where the pupils are placed in the familiar situation of written tests) or outside the classrom (where each pupil is placed in a face-to-face relation with an experimenter). The actualizations of knowledge elaborated by pupils when they are asked to resolve an elementary written addition problem are therefore dealt with in the cognitive and social dimensions inherant in these situations of questioning.