The Development of Children's Construction of Historical Duration: A New Approach and Some Findings

Abstract

Although history teaching would profit from an understanding of the development of children's comprehension of historical duration, the dominant research tradition in this field seems to have failed to provide such understanding, due to a descriptive approach and methodology which has tended to tap merely the accretion of historical knowledge. Concepts and methods suggested by cognitive psychology and recent experimental studies of the perception of duration have been employed in the present exploratory study of judgments of historical duration by children aged between eight and fifteen years. Results indicate a developmental sequence in forms of historical temporal awareness, ranging from a perceptually‐dominated approach compatible with Ornstein's (1969) views, to the coseriation of events with an equal interval measure of time. Implications for teaching and further research are briefly discussed.