Graphs are commonly used to represent mathematical functions, data from life and earth sciences and to illustrate scientific phenomena and play an important role in teaching scientific concepts. However, in high school, learners have difficulties to translate numerical data into visual presentations. At the beginning of the school year, diagnostic assessment allows to evaluate the learners’ graphing skills and to identify the parts of the graph on which learners have difficulties. The diagnostic evaluation focused on graphical construction skill allowed us to detect the gaps of the high school learners and proposing some pedagogical tools to help them to improve their graphical construction skills; that play an important role in teaching different concepts of life and earth sciences. Our results showed that girls represent 63.13% of the learners assessed, the majority (63.59%) of participants is from first year high school (TC) aged between 14 and 16 years. Learners in high school baccalaureate (Bac) represent only 36.4% of learners assessed and aged between 17 and 20 years. Almost a quarter of the TC learners did not complete the required graph and 7% of the learners drew only the axes and 34.61% of the learners inverted them. The graduations are presented according to the scale in 64.78% realization and according to the order of the table in 35.21% of learners’ graph. The textual parts are present in 73% of the realization and a large number of learners (62.17%) did not present the scale on the graph. The majority of learners do not have the necessary skills to establish all elements of the graph. In this work, we propose pedagogical tools (mnemonic models, method sheet, etc.) that will allow a better organization of graphic teaching in primary, secondary and even high schools and make graphs cognitively available to learners.

Didactic, graphing, learning process, graph characteristics, life and earth sciences.