Georges Lefèvre (1862-1929) is, with a few other figures such as Charles Chabot in Lyon, one of the pioneers of the grounding of university disciplines and research in what at the time was called the educational sciences. When a member of the faculty of literature at the university of Lille, he was for a while the poster boy for these methods. As the confident holder of a scholarship from the young Third Republic, succeeding at the academic contests for the teaching of philosophy (agrégation) (1887) and then writing a doctorate (1895), he taught for fourteen years at the Laon lycée (high school), then at the university of Douai first in philosophy (1896), then in the professorship created for him in the educational sciences (1899-1913) before becoming full professor of philosophy. In 1898 he established a Pedagogical Institute and attracted to its faculty a large number of teachers and academic inspectors (in particular for primary education). He was elected Dean of the faculty in 1903 and kept that position until his death in 1929. This paper will not concentrate on the details a Third Republic academic career but focus on the four field studies Lefèvre directed between 1899 and 1910 in the schools, middle schools and high schools of the Lille school district in order to assess their goals, results and limits, while highlighting this concern for the “field” as an innovation in the area of education research.