Misconceptions in teaching physics and technology at primary school with regard to students in teacher training
COLSON, Francis, 1999
Within the context of teacher training in i.u.f.m. (teacher training college), physics and technology are subjects which are components of basic units intended to all students preparing the competitive entrance examination. Now most students consider themselves too often as destitute, even unfit and incompetent for this kind of teaching at school. 
We start from the postulate that this attitude issupported by misconceptions. we make also the hypothesis that training may lead to a modification of these misconceptions and, as a result, to a change of attitudes and speech. Our methods to reach tested subjects' misconceptions are based on free association from suggestive terms as physics and technology and on relations setting and associative maps of items coming from answers in a first open questionnaire : physics, equipment, knowledge, formulas, technology, diagrams, experiences, reading, environment. making-up of couples of words (relations' diagram ; wheel's test) is inspired by Grize's data collection. Answers have been transposed in numerical values, which indicate the numbers of relations settings of items' couples. We have analysed crude and weighted data. processing led to relations' diagrams that, by assumption, express subjects' misconceptions. 
Research work consisted in answers' analysis at the beginning and at the end of teacher training, item after item, and in the explanation of the evolution of diagrams, which represent subjects' misconceptions.