BUTTARD Manuel

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Thesis defended on October 12, 2018

Thesis Director : Halim Bennacer

Thesis Title : Support systems for children facing educational difficulties in elementary school : Study of their operating modes and effects on success at school Does school have the appropriate means for favourizing success of underachievers ?

Thesis Abstract :
With the Jules Ferry laws ensuring free and compulsory schooling, equal chances of succeeding were expected in a meritocratic established school system. Reality proved otherwise: attending school still does not allow all schoolchildren to progress in the same way, as some of them encounter difficulties from the beginning. The struggle against academic failure cannot stop a considerable amount of pupils from finishing school without satisfactorily mastering the basic elements of the programmes. Moreover, recent research works have seemed to prove programmes providing assistance for underachievers to be ineffective. This thesis offers a comparative evaluation of such support systems in elementary school. It investigates their effectiveness and modus operandi, with regard to what already exists, as well as to the use of data obtained by questionnaires, tests or content analysis. The protean support systems against school failure will be shown to include a large arsenal of disparatemeasures, with actual but confusing recruitment rules. The comparative analysis of schoolchildren's results, of their own impressions of performance and of the teachers’ requests indicates that this distribution takes the children's needs into consideration. Most of the time, those most in trouble are the ones taken care of and the chosen educational counselling will depend on the situation. But, in a context of means shortage, and in the absence of a precise definition and regulation of operating procedures, these rules are often infringed. If, with a few exceptions, the weakest students cannot catch up, we notice that help efficiency mostly proves to be uneven.It depends on the personal, sociodemographic and environmental characteristics of the children, but also on the nature and operating methods of the aid system. The beneficial effects seen with some children are concealed by more disappointing results obtained with others, whose needs were often less obvious at first. Thus, in our opinion, the optimization of the struggle against learning difficulties requires to further consistency and a better coordination in recruitment and schoolchild care, as well as skill or knowledge sharing between professionals. A network organisation of support systems would most likely enable to rationalize pupils' educational background and to combine the efforts of skilled professionals rather than accumulating them

Key Words : learning difficulties, failure at school, educational inequalities, support systems, remediation,evaluation

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