Difficulties at school: What pupils, parents, and education professionals tell about that
In spite of a will of objectivity, the evaluation of the pupils’ learning difficulties is partly influenced by the evaluators’ social representations of learning difficulties. This study aims at analysing these representations for diverse actors of the education system, that is, pupils, parents, teachers, and educational psychologists. The results show that learning difficulty comes in a variety of forms: disorders related to the family, the peers, school, individual characteristics (personality, cognitive disorders, behaviors), culture, and help to provide. Moreover, these different categories are not found in an equivalent way according to the groups even though internal factors are predominant in the descriptions. The implications of these contrasted representations are discussed.