Jean-Paul Fischer

University of Lorraine | UdL · UFR Psychologie

We studied the effect of the number and characteristics of siblings (sex and age), on school achievement in numeracy and literacy from kindergarten to 5th grade, in two large French cohorts (the Elfe cohort, more than 4,400 children, and the DEPP panel, more than 9,500 children). Running linear mixed effects models, we find that, independently of s...

Résumé Desmurget (2019) a sévèrement condamné l’utilisation des écrans par les jeunes enfants (avant 6 ans) car elle pourrait les « décérébrer ». L’analyse critique de son argumentation suggère cependant qu’un tel rejet pourrait être une position par trop radicale. Les premières données scolaires de l’étude Elfe (Étude longitudinale française depui...

The mathematics achievement discrepancy between girls and boys, with its subsequent occupational consequences, is an issue that has received considerable attention in the literature. It is often referred to as the ‘math‐gap’ and favours boys. A major component of the explanation of this gap resides in determining its age of onset. We analyse here d...

Young children, who are exposed to Latin script letters, experience difficulties in distinguishing between the reversible letters b and d and may therefore transform b into d (and vice versa). When children begin to write, in cultures with left-to-right writing/reading systems, they also often turn Arabic digits in the direction of writing/reading,...

A live video was used to study the development of visual self-recognition in a cross-sectional sample of 152 typically developing French children aged between 15 months to 6 years. Three reactions to a mark placed on the child’s cheek without their knowledge were studied: the touch of the mark with their hand, the ocular responsiveness to the mark...

Multisensory learning to read involves, to a large extent, learning to write. A major problem in the initial teaching of handwriting is preventing children from producing reversed letters, especially when the reversed letters are identical to other letters. Torres et al. (2021) offer an efficient method for remediating this problem. Here, we analyz...

The French National Cohort of Children Study ( Etude Longitudinale Française depuis l'Enfance— ELFE) tested the literacy and numeracy skills of 4- to 5-year-old typically developing children in the second year of école maternelle . Tasks were administered by more than 4,000 teachers at schools across France. One of the study's numeracy tasks requir...

Background The development of early literacy skills in preschoolers is an important predictor of future academic performance. Four main domains of early literacy are currently observed: letter knowledge, vocabulary, phonological awareness and oral comprehension. A multiplicity of tasks or tests measures these domains in English language. However, t...

This paper describes a French research project to co-design an early literacy/early numeracy tablet app for kindergarten students. In order to create an app that takes into account classroom/teaching constraints and the results of recent research, we adopted a theoretical co-design framework and followed a methodology involving researchers, educati...

Recent research into character reversals in writings produced by occidental children has shown that they mainly reverse the left-oriented digits (1, 2, 3, 7, and 9) and therefore appear to apply a right-orienting rule. But do they produce similar reversal errors when asked to recognize the digits? In an experiment, based on eye-tracking observation...

Background Young children's mathematics abilities may be divided between symbolic and non‐symbolic skills. Lower performance of SES disadvantaged versus advantaged children has already been established in symbolic math. Aim This study aimed to verify the effect of children's SES category on non‐symbolic mathematical (numerical) performance. Sampl...

The question of teaching a standard written algorithm for the four arithmetical operations in the first years of elementary school is increasingly raised as a consequence of the possibility of using calculators, tablets, and computers. This article first presents arguments both against and for maintaining this teaching in the first school years. Th...

Reversing characters (digits and letters) when writing, and complete mirror writing, raise one of the oldest and most mysterious questions in developmental and educational psychology: Why do five-year-old children write symbols (e.g., ꓱ for E) they have neither learnt nor seen? Attempts to draw up a complete explanatory theory of character reversal...

Ensuring students correctly understand the notion of equality is a fundamental problem in teaching mathematics. Is it possible to teach arithmetic in such a way that students do not misinterpret the equal sign "=" as indicating the result of an arithmetic operation and, consequently, viewing the arithmetic operation symbols (+, -, or x) as systemat...

Numeracy is the ability to use and to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts, and to apply these in a range of everyday activities. Good numeracy appears today the best protection against unemployment, low wages and poor health. Innumeracy can then be simply defined as the absence of numeracy. That is, innumeracy refers to the growing...

Recent research has found that children reverse mainly the left-oriented characters when writing from memory (e.g. they write ɩ and ε instead of J and 3). In order to obtain an objective definition of the left-orientation of a character, the ratings of the level of left-orientation of all the asymmetrical capital letters and digits by 142 adult stu...

Recent research has established that 5- to 6-year-old typically developing children in a left–right writing culture spontaneously reverse left-oriented characters (e.g., they write [https://static-content.springer.com/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11145-016-9688-y/MediaObjects/11145_2016_9688_Figa_HTML.gif] instead of J) when they write single characters....

The present study examined the development of mirror writing in typically developing children using a longitudinal design involving 166 children initially aged 4–5 years. The children were tested three times, with approximately one year between tests. The main predictions were that: (i) mirror copying of characters at T1 (4- to 5-years old) will be...

Non-pathological, spontaneous mirror writing, whether complete or partial, has long been associated with writing with the left hand and attributed to the fact that abductive writing, which most people find easier, is from right to left when people write with their left hand. However, recent research suggests another explanation: children who do not...

This article presents a simple theory according to which the left-right reversal of single digits by 5- and 6-year-old children is mainly due to the application of an implicit right-writing or -orienting rule. A number of nontrivial predictions can be drawn from this theory. First, left-oriented digits (1, 2, 3, 7, and 9) will be reversed more freq...

The effect of physical congruence is manifested by the fact that people have more difficulties to compare numerically two numbers physically incongruent (e.g., 7 and 2: interference effect), that these figures with the same font size (7 and 2), and, most importantly, that these figures congruent with physical sizes (7 and 2: facilitation effect). T...

The numerical distance effect is manifested by the fact that the comparison between two nearby numbers (e.g., 4 and 5) is harder (that is to say increases the response time) as the comparison of two "distant" numbers (e.g., 2 and 7). Based on a review of the literature and an experimental study, this paper concludes that elementary school students...

Most studies of mirror writing have focused on specific populations (e.g., pathological cases) or conditions (e.g., right-handed individuals writing with their left hand); hence, many simple questions about mirror writing in typically developing 5-year-old children remain unanswered. The present study addresses 2 simple but important issues concern...

Nous presentons une hypothese nouvelle, fondee theoriquement sur les caracteristiques et proprietes des apprentissages et connaissances implicites, pour expliquer l'ecriture en miroir des lettres majuscules par l'enfant. Cette hypothese complete les theories neuropsychologiques postulant que, durant une courte periode (vers l'âge de 5 ans), l'enfan...

The systematic teaching of character (figures and letters) writing at nursery school raises the question of why and how five or six-year-old children use mirror writing. Advances in neurosciences and our recent empirical investigations shed new lights on this long-standing issue. The importance of contextual factors is emphasised. It is the case wh...

Typically developing 5- to 6-year-old children often reverse some digits (e.g., ɛ for 3) or single (capital) letters (e.g., Я for R) when they are required to write them under dictation. A theoretical approach to this phenomenon, based on an implicit right writing rule and that postulates an influence of the preceding writing, was tested in an expe...

Capital letters mirror-writing in children: a new hypothesis to unlock the mystery To explain the mirror-writing of the capital letters in the child, we propose a new hypothesis. The hypothesis is theoretically grounded on the features and properties of the implicit learning and implicit knowledge. It complements the neuropsychological theories whi...

Dans cette recherche, nous cherchons à éprouver la pertinence de la distinction de deux mémoires qualifiées d'exacte et d'inférentielle. Dans les deux expériences, sur 140 élèves de Cours Moyen et 456 étudiants respectivement, les sujets prennent d'abord connaissance d'un matériel numérique: un problème arithmétique ou un calcul mental (e.g. 86 + 4...

The present research was focused on a systematic developmental study of the left-right reversals in the writing of the digits by 5- to 7-year-old children. Children were asked to write, from memory (under dictation), the Arabic digits (1 to 9, but not in their naturalorder). The results of experiment 1 show that individual characteristics, fixed (e...

This paper, called the basic article or basic text, examines six major questions—and suggests some partial answers—pertaining to Developmental Dyscalculia (DD). The six questions are: (1) What can we retain of the original definition of DD?, (2) How can we systematically detect DD?, (3) How do we have to interpret the current prevalence data?, (4)...

This paper, called the basic article or basic text, examines six major questions - and suggests some partial answers - pertaining to the Developmental Dyscalculia (DD). The six questions are: (1) What can we retain of the original definition of the DD ?, (2) How can we systematically detect the DD ?, (3) How do we have to interpret the current prev...

The author discusses, with the light of the new data reported in the different contributions, some questions he has raised in the basis text, which introduces this special issue on Developmental Dyscalculia (DD). That is what led him notably to the conclusion that the often proposed prevalence of 6% of dyscalculic subjects is exaggerated and has no...

[fre] La dyscalculie est une notion introduite pour souligner des difficultés dans le traitement des informations numériques, notamment le calcul. Elle peut être acquise . (c’est le cas de sujets qui savaient calculer mais qui ont perdu en grande partie cette capacité, par exemple à la suite d’un accident neurologique), ou développementale, . si el...

Gender differences in arithmetic : from childhood to adulthood A recent survey by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economical Studies, over more than 10,000 subjects aged 18 to 65 years, leads to a study of the gender differences in elementary arithmetic problem solving. Even if the magnitude of the overall difference (favouring the...

To date, few studies have investigated the evolution of problem solving and general numeracy abilities during adulthood: skills that have obvious social importance. In this research, evolutions in adults’ mental arithmetic skills were investigated using data from the IVQ 2004 French national survey, which tested 9,185 adults aged between 18 and 65....

The author systematically and critically reviews the studies which have found a percentage of 6 % (or more) students with dyscalculia. Then, with criteria previously developed and justified (Fischer J.-P., Le diagnostic de dyscalculie à partir de l'évaluation en CE2 : vers une approche scientifique ? Nouvelle Revue de l'AIS, 32, 85-98, 2005), he es...

Dans un complément à la discussion de Stéphan Desrochers, l'auteur argue qu'il est difficile de comprendre ses propres observations sur des enfants de 3, 4 et 5 ans sous l'hypothèse d’un nombre et d’un calcul qui seraient déjà présents chez les bébés. En outre, les comportements apparemment numériques des bébés peuvent être expliqués par la dynamiq...

The French annual assessments for third, sixth, and, since 2002, seventh graders report the gender difference for each item (since 1999). Such a massive data — more than one thousand of different items and several hundreds of repeated (one or more years later) items — allows to detect cognitive gender differences, and to verify their reliability ov...

This study contributes to the debate about the Flynn effect by proposing a long-term comparison (1921-2001) of the numerical knowledge of two cohorts of three- to five-and-a-half year-old children. In 1921, Beckmann (1923) assessed the numerical development of children using four tasks (Production, Distinction, Recognition, and Naming). In 2001, we...

Comparison between two scenarios of appropriation of the written vocabulary The classical method of teaching reading begins with explicit learning of the graphemes-phonemes correspondences (GPC), and results in an early sequential word processing. Therefore, it can hinder the memorization of the written vocabulary and of its related large reading...

La distinction entre connaissances procédurales et déclaratives a principalement été développée en psychologie cognitive par Anderson (1983). Cependant, un postulat majeur de la théorie d' Anderson — à savoir que la connaissance déclarative est un prérequis de la connaissance procédurale — nuit à l'image et aux applications pédagogiques de cette im...

In experiment 1, we demonstrate that children can learn an artificial grammar in the standard conditions (see, for example, Reber, 1993). This implicit learning capacity does not develop in the examined age-period (9 to 11). Children's verbal explanations come under the three classical models of artificial grammar learning: abstraction of rules, co...

In experiment 1, we demonstrate that children can learn an artificial grammar in the standard conditions (see, for example, Reber, 1993). This implicit learning capacity does not develop in the examined age-period (9 to 11). Children's verbal explanations come under the three classical models of artificial grammar learning : abstraction of rules, c...

Texte intégral accessible uniquement aux membres de l'Université de Lorraine

« La répétition et l'entraînement conduisent vraisemblablement le sujet à automatiser les procédures de traitement de l'information qu'il met en œuvre... Il y a là un champ d'investigations prometteur », écrit Claude Bonnet dans son Manuel pratique de psychophysique (Colin, 1986). La psychopédagogie ne devrait pas rester à l'écart de ces investigat...

In this article, we try to elucidate one of the main divergences — the relative importance of counting and subitizing for the young child's apprehension of number — between the theories of Klahr and Wallace (1976) and Gelman and Gallistel (1978). We found ourselves upon experimental data obtained from 144 four and five year old children submitted t...