This study examined the understanding of historical time among elementary school students ages 6-12 years in Northern Ireland. Findings indicated that students relied on two effective tools (factual information about material history and their own experience) and two ineffective tools (looking for examples of progress/development, and anchoring…

This paper reports on a study that represents a new approach to understanding early and middle grade children's development of historical time awareness. The study sought to embed children's time awareness in a sociocultural framework, and to move beyond linguistic symbol systems to incorporate visual data sources. The researchers began with three…

In order to investigate elementary school students' understanding of historical time, this study conducted open-ended interviews with 58 children in kindergarten through sixth grade. The students were asked to place nine illustrations from various periods of American history in chronological order and to talk about the reasoning behind the order…