Odors and flavors at elementary school
COMTE Marie-Jeanne

Key-words : science education, elementary school, didactical structures, objectivation, odor, phenomenology, flavor

The purpose of this research is to make proposals for a scientific initiation for Elementary School that could drive pupils to pass from private and implicit knowledge about flavors and odors to a social shared knowledge. It is the elaboration of a communicable phenomenology that let to a scientific approach of odor and flavors. Concerning an area where one has no instrument of measure, the objectivation consists in developping standardized procedures of collect of information and their codification. Sense the human are used for the plug of information and the definition of rules insures some the reliability and the reproductibility. We propose activities bringing pupils to the conscience of olfactive and gustative sensations that they feel, to refine them, and to elaborate symbolic communicational systems.
Proposed solutions are mainly inspired from a preliminary study about knowledge concerning odors and flavors.
These activities have been carried out with pupils, firstly in individual interview so as to notice possible difficulties and ways to remedy them, and secondly in classroom with the intention to appreciate their feasibility in a normal context. The same activities have been proposed to students, future teachers, to study the manner of which they process the situations without particular training.
The thesis opens on argued proposals both by results and by the specificities of the domain.
The thesis constitutes a contribution to didactical structures allowing children of Elementary School to access to objectivation having course in experimental sciences.