Child's View Of Time
Understanding the complexity of chronology is often challenging for the elementary student, yet this understanding forms one of the basic paradigms of a child's developing a sense of period, change, causation, and evolution. This is not just true when thinking about historical events, but in the sense of mathematical progression, scientific experiments (change over time), certainly the concept of biological evolution, and even more a child's sense of identity that aids in creating a contextual reference for the present. In the 21st century, it is also vital that students begin to understand and relate to broad reaching concepts of development if they are to become productive citizens of a global world. In addition, words, phrases, and conceptions relating to chronology are quite frequent in children's literature, curriculum text, and lecture material, and it is common to quiz students on what happened, when did it happen, why did it happen, and less frequently, but still important, what might have happened or what will happen based on past chronology.
Ironically, this is not a new concern within the educational field. An 1892 article in The Parents' Review suggests that children need to learn about their own time and place, work backwards, and then accentuate skills towards future projection. The article further suggests that is not just chronological understanding that is vital for a child's development, but the ability to accurately judge and estimate how time passes. For instance, it is not just important for a child to understand chronological events. Instead, perceiving chronology and time are akin to telling a child, You have 15 minutes to complete this exercise. Thus, from a developmental paradigm, the nature of time and chronology are both important indicators of human development and necessary skills for the modern learner.
Simsek (2007) finds that in order to develop a concept of temporal history, first measurements of time, distance and spatial relationship must be mastered in a way that allows children to express an understanding of historical time, as well as to relate it to their current reading and experiential levels. Every child constructs their concepts of space and time quite differently and different stages of their...
Piaget describes an invariant sequence in which children construct such concepts with a logical evolving hierarchy; elementary constructions must precede ones that are more sophisticated. Through this process, the child learns to cope with the universe and to organize situations and accumulated facts within a larger template that becomes chronology. This actually occurs at the end of the sensorimotor stage, or around 3-4 years of age. During this frame, the child cannot represent "known" space or a sense of a city block or the time it takes to walk that block, but they can envision that the city block is different from their yard or living room. Similarly, as children learn to use various measuring instruments, they initiate higher-level thought processes to establish relationships between events and things. A more robust stage of measurement occurs during the concrete operational period; yet it is not until formal operations, around age twelve, that children can adequately express general notions of quantification and similarities, or begins to understand the differences between past, present and future (Simsek, 2007).
The article uses a relatively small sample of fifth grade students in Turkey. Variables included timetables, photographs, household tools, artifacts, etc. And the students' interests, reactions and attitudes were measured. The small sample size and limited time frame are certainly weaknesses in the study, but prove that more research is necessary in order to gauge a broader vision of what it takes to help elementary learners both understand the concept of chronological development, and be able to use the concept in their expression of both quantitative and qualitative explanations (e.g. math, science, the humanities, etc.).
Barton (2004) explains that time is a complex concept. Most people, for instance, feel that it is a progression that goes on forever, unaffected by everything else -- typically measured by the clock or calendar. As a concept, time is quite artificial -- it is determined by the way humans divide up a terrestrial day, seasons, or a contrived manner of ordering life. Time is also a measure of the duration of events and the intervals between them. While the subject of time is somewhat intuitive in humans, it…
