Newcastle University

Karine Bécu-Robinault

• FaSMEd Partner Team member French Institute of Education
• Email: Karine.Robinault@ens-lyon.fr
• Telephone: +33 (0)4 26 73 12 22
• Associate Professor at the French Institute of Education.

Karine Bécu-Robinault is an Associate Professor at IFE (French Institute of Education). She has worked in the field of science education research about teaching and learning physics since 1993. She is interested both in teachers’ professional development and understanding students learning difficulties while connecting phenomena and concepts.

Her main research methods rely on video analysis of classroom interactions, teachers’ interviews concerning planning phases. Collected data permit to follow teaching and learning activities along several lessons concerning a given scientific theme. Her theoretical approaches take into account modeling tasks, semiotic resources and multimodality.

Since 2005, she manages research-development projects concerning IBSE, science standards in teaching sequences and evaluation of competences. In these projects, primary and lower secondary school teachers and science education researchers collaborate in order to produce teaching sequences, meeting research results, teaching constraints and institutional injunctions.

On the basis of this work, she participated to the construction of an in service training web site in cooperation with teachers and researchers. This web site is composed of two different parts: one is devoted to teaching materials, the other one is related to giving teachers the opportunity to better understand students’ answers, and give information on specific ways of managing the classroom in relation to the teaching sequences proposed. Teaching materials proposed on this website are still worked out to be improved, on the basis of updated research results, teachers proposals, new requirements or opportunities. For instance, she integrated, in collaboration with teachers, the use of touch-screen user interface in an optic sequence.