contribution to the analysis of phases of action during physics labwork in the second year of French University. 
The possible learning through actions
BENEY, Michel, Septembre 1998

Our study concerns the description and the analysis of students' actions while they perform physics labwork. The studied sessions of  labwork take place at second year of University , they concern scientific students.
Our description uses results of the cognitive psychology about action. But those results concern  low conceptual level tasks, so  they have been adapted to high level conceptual tasks as labwork.
 We have made an "a-priori" description of three sessions of  labwork using a description in term of action networks. Those networks give the possibility to describe the complexity of labwork and to describe how conceptual and procedural knowlege in physic intervene to  interpret actions. 
We describe students’ activities in term of intellectual operations and we analyse them through our networks. We show that though being strongly guided by a labsheet, students take initiatives in order to give sense to their actions and that they do not do exactly what we expect them to do. We have observed experts (teachers at this university level) while they perform the same tasks students have to perform. We show that they do not use so much conceptual knowledge but more procedural one. So we pose  the question of interaction between knowlege and actions and the question of effectivness of labwork. We propose a lot of suggestions to increase the effectivness of  labwork.