ABSTRACT
Educators and historians frequently assert that an understanding of time and chronology is essential to learning history, little research has been conducted on the development of children’s perception of historical time. In open-ended interviews with children from kindergarten through sixth grade, we found that even the youngest make basic distinctions in historical time and that these become increasingly differentiated with age. Perhaps most important, this research indicates that children develop significant historical understandings prior to their use of dates and other aspects of adult temporal vocabularies. The issued national standards in United States and world history identify chronology as a basic component of historical thinking, and educators concerned with the teaching of history routinely assert the fundamental necessity of an understanding of time. The connection between the development of historical thinking and temporal understanding has never been fully elucidated; indeed, the school curriculum rarely addresses chronology or historical time in any systematic way.
