Do students ideas about the antigen-antibody reaction change when they are gathered to design an experimental procedure?
This study is a preliminary work before the development of the CoPEX software that helps students and teachers to design experimental procedure. To this date, there are no other intelligent learning environments for this task. An experiment was done in two high schools during an immunology course (a lecture and a practical work). It is done in ecological conditions during a laboratory session with students majoring in science (ISCED level 3A-16/18 years old). Students designed (imagined, wrote and executed) their own experimental procedure to obtain data to answer to the practical work s question. The first focus of the study was to know how students ideas about the immunology topic, the link between the antigen and the antibody, evolved after the course. The second focus was to determine the main principles used to solve the problem (how to show the complementarity between the two molecules), first during a reflection phase on the design and second during the procedure writing phase.
