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This thesis presents an analysis of a learning situation of positive and negative integers. It is considered as a case study within the more general context of the development of school learning analysis tools based on cognitive psychology. An analysis of error patterns obtained from a group of 55 secondary I level students has shown: (1) that the acquisition of the integer concept can imply several levels of integration of the sign and the numerical aspect; (2) that the set of all possible addition and subtraction items can be classified according to their possibility of being related to previous numerical knowledge; (3) that errors in addition and subtraction can be explained by either the utilisation of previous knowledge that was contrary to what was taught, or by systematic transformations of the procedures that were taught, or by problems with the integer concept. The thesis ends with a discussion of the properties of an information processing system that could generate the observed performances, and of the pedagogical implications of that kind of analysis.

In an event-method directed forgetting task, instructions to remember (R) or forget (F) were integrated throughout the presentation of four videos depicting common events (e.g., baking cookies). In a concurrent-instruction paradigm (Experiments 1-5) participants were instructed to remember (R) anything presented when the video border was green and to forget (F) anything presented when the video border was purple. In a post-instruction paradigm (Experiments 6-10) participants were instructed to remember anything preceding a green circle and to forget anything preceding a purple circle. The R or F segments lasted 35 s and were randomly assigned such that each video always contained 4 R and 4 F segments. Participants responded more accurately to cued-recall questions (Experiments 1 and 6) and true-false statements (Experiments 2-5 and 7-10) regarding R segments than F segments although this difference was found only for relatively specific (the woman added 3 cups of flour) as opposed to general (the woman added flour) information (Experiments 5 and 7-10). Participants retain a general representation of the events they intend to forget – even though this representation is not as specific as the representation of events they intend to remember. At encoding, participants were faster to discriminate targets overlaid upon F segments compared to R segments in the concurrent-instruction paradigm (Experiment 3) but were slower to detect targets presented following F compared to R instructions in the post-instruction paradigm (Experiments 6-7 and 9-10). Therefore, whereas both concurrent- and post-instruction paradigms produced comparable effects on subsequent mnemonic performance, the underlying processes are not identical. In the concurrent-instruction paradigm, participants needed to control access to working memory; in the post-instruction paradigm, participants needed to control the contents of working memory. In the former case, we expect that participants minimized processing of F segments while actively rehearsing R segments. In the latter case, we expect that participants engaged one or more active mechanisms associated with the removal of processing resources from the representation of the F segments (functionally terminating rehearsal) while focusing instead on the elaborative rehearsal of the R segments.

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