ERIC Number: EJ948894
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0885-2014
EISSN: N/A
Children's Reasoning about the Temporal Order of Past and Future Events
McCormack, Teresa; Hanley, Mary
Cognitive Development, v26 n4 p299-314 Oct-Dec 2011
Four- and five-year-olds completed two sets of tasks that involved reasoning about the temporal order in which events had occurred in the past or were to occur in the future. Four-year-olds succeeded on the tasks that involved reasoning about the order of past events but not those that involved reasoning about the order of future events, whereas 5-year-olds passed both types of tasks. Individual children who failed the past-event tasks were not particularly likely to fail the more difficult future-event tasks. However, children's performance on the reasoning tasks was predictive of their performance on a task assessing their comprehension of the terms "before" and "after." Our results suggest that there may be a developmental change over this age range in the ability to flexibly represent and reason about the before-and-after relationships between events. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)
Descriptors: Cognitive Development, Children, Preschool Children, Task Analysis, Thinking Skills, Correlation, Comprehension, Age Differences, Child Development, Time Perspective, Academic Failure, Academic Achievement, Predictor Variables
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Elementary Education; Preschool Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A