ABSTRACT
In modern industrial society, time is a particularly useful concept for making sense of the world. Appointments, opening hours, production schedules, and workdays all depend on some consensus about time. Teachers of young children are keenly aware of the need to develop time concepts, and a significant portion of their curriculum involves extending children’s understanding of clocks and calendars. The field-testing proved to be crucial, because although pre-service teachers had no overall problem sequencing the pictures, they encountered difficulties with certain images—notably, any that included ethnic minorities. One aspect of historical thinking that S. Linda had become interested in was students’ understanding of time. In her study of children’s retelling of historical narratives, she and Christine Pappas had found that elementary students used language related to historical time, particularly by referring to broad categories such as long ago, in the old times, or simply the past.
