Jérôme Prado | Brain, Behavior, and Learning Lab

Inégalités scolaires: a new book bridging sociology and cognitive psychology

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Educational inequalities are unusually pronounced in France, and few subjects are debated more fiercely. Why do some pupils acquire fundamental skills more easily than others? Why do gaps in achievement persist despite public policies designed to reduce them? And do these gaps stem above all from the school, the family, the individual characteristics of pupils, or from the interaction between them?

Inégalités scolaires: approche croisée entre sociologie et psychologie cognitive, which we have co-edited with Cléa Girard and Stanislas Morel, takes an unusual approach to these questions. Rather than juxtaposing disciplinary perspectives, each chapter is co-written by a sociologist and a cognitive psychologist working together, so that the complementarities between the two fields become visible.

The contributions explore the interactions between family environment, cognitive development, teaching practices and school learning. Individual chapters address the construction of academic skills, shared reading, behavioural genetics, preschool education, difficulties in learning to read, and dyslexia.

The book grew out of the international seminar series on educational inequalities that we have been co-organising with Stanislas Morel, which has brought sociologists and cognitive scientists into the same room since 2022.

The book is written in French and will be published by the Presses Universitaires de Lyon on 24 September 2026.

More information from the publisher

A day in the life of a person with dyscalculia: a series of games

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dyscalculia is a learning disorder affecting numbers and mathematics, and it concerns roughly 5 to 10% of children worldwide. People with dyscalculia may struggle to grasp the concept of number and the relations between numbers, to memorize arithmetic facts, to carry out calculations, and to handle everyday situations involving numbers.

To help people understand what that actually feels like, our team has designed a series of six short games that follow a single day, from waking up to the afternoon snack. Each one turns an ordinary daily activity into the kind of effortful puzzle that numbers can become for someone with dyscalculia:

Waking up — the clock game
Getting dressed — the sock game
Breakfast — mystery words
Leaving for school — find your way
A day at school — the battle game
Snack time — the coin game

Each game comes with two pages of instructions: one for parents, explaining the rules and why the game is relevant to dyscalculia, and one for children, setting out the key points.

An important caveat, which we state in the booklet itself: people with dyscalculia do not literally perceive the world the way these games depict it. The games are meant to illustrate the additional mental effort required to make sense of certain mathematical concepts, not to simulate the disorder.

The booklet was created by members of the Brain, Behavior and Learning team at the CRNL — Lise Viallet, Aurélie Lafaix, Charlotte Constant-Varlet, Jérôme Prado, Honorine Bouchet and Tatum Holley.

Download the games (PDF, in French)

The lab at MCLS 2026 in Padua

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Members of the lab travelled to Padua in June for the annual meeting of the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society (MCLS).

Charlotte Constant-Varlet and Morgane Papillon each presented their doctoral research as posters.

Jérôme Prado gave a talk together with Catherine Thevenot (University of Lausanne) introducing the automatized counting theory of mental arithmetic (the proposal that children’s arithmetic fluency emerges through the progressive automatization of counting procedures rather than through the retrieval of memorized facts alone). The theory is set out in full in a recent paper in Developmental Review: Counting on automatization: The automatized counting theory of mental arithmetic.