Résumé
As future citizens, developing students’ critical thinking skills is a major challenge for our societies. Indeed, to have a critical mind allows students to take part in debates on Socio-Scientific Questions (SSQ) in an informed way. This critical thinking depends, at least in part, on the epistemic beliefs (i.e. beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing) and argumentation of individuals. However, numerous empirical studies show that links exist between these two objects. To better understand these links, epistemic beliefs need to be described in detail and articulated with the representations that individuals have concerning the debate. Moreover, the in-depth review of the literature and certain theoretical considerations lead us to propose the thesis that opinions must also be taken into account in the study of epistemic beliefs in the context of QSS. As such, the research question guiding this dissertation is: How do knowledge and opinion beliefs, debate representations, and argumentation about high school students' SSQs relate to each other? In order to explore this research question, I present a fine-grained qualitative study conducted with 12 high school students who participated in digital debates on SSQs. The data collected includes interviews, responses to pre/post-tests and interventions from digital debates. The results show that high school students who argue best are those who take into account uncertainties related to the nature of knowledge (rather than those related to sources) and who consider that two contradictory opinions can be separated by debating or by evaluating the quality of their arguments (and not that all opinions are equal). All these elements, both theoretical and empirical, allow us to propose, a conceptual framework to describe critical thinking on SSQs, and devices dedicated to its teaching.