Abstract
This Idea Swap describes a questionnaire that can be used to assess elementary school children’s time knowledge (TK; Labrell et al., 2020). Time knowledge has been defined as “the correct representation and use of the various time units (e.g., seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years” (Labrell et al., 2016, p. 2). Time knowledge refers to an emergent sense of time during preschool, as well as to the conventional system of time units that help children to deal with life in society (school activities, meals, leisure, etc.). Time knowledge increases with age, especially from 6 to 8 years, and is strongly linked to numerical skills.
Time is an abstract, linguistically, and cognitive complex concept. Time awareness is foundational to our autobiographical memory (AM), both for the past and for the future. Autobiographical memory is essential for our ability to relate and reflect on our personal experiences (to tell stories of our personal experiences) and to self-regulate and plan. Despite the centrality of time to our lives, relatively little research has investigated children’s development of a sense of time and understanding of time concepts. Persons’ understanding of time depends on the acquisition of many interrelated linguistic and cognitive abilities: understanding and being able to talk about time; being able to distinguish past, present, and future; and reasoning about sequences of events. Below is a list of some aspects of the development of temporal concepts reported in a review article by Zhang and Hudson (2018):
Three-year-olds use inflections and will to identify past and future events with novel verbs (which one is going to gling? Which one has glinged)?
Understanding how temporal adverbs (yesterday, today, tomorrow) are used to organize events in time is more difficult than understanding how verb inflections denote completed or future events.
Children use time words before they comprehend them; for example, children use the words yesterday, today, tomorrow by age 4 (or even earlier), but do not comprehend them like adults until age 7.
Three- to 5-year-old children answer questions about yesterday more accurately than questions about tomorrow.
Four-year-olds know the rank ordering of duration time words (e.g., day > hour > minute), but have no sense of their actual duration. They will think that 4 min is longer than 2 hr.
Five-year-olds have some sense of duration of familiar events, for example, some events are longer or shorter than others—washing hands takes less time than eating lunch; but they cannot judge time duration before age 7.
Labrell et al. (2020) developed the Time Knowledge Questionnaire (TKQ) with norms for typically developing children ages 6 to 11 years. The TKQ has 25 questions in seven categories. The full TKQ with norms is available free online in the Labrell et al. (2020) article in an open-access journal (see doi at the end of this Idea Swap). The first four question sets investigate conventional TK: orientation (OR), sequences (SEQ), time units (TU), telling the time on a clock (CL):
The fifth question set evaluates children’s diachronic thinking. Diachronic thinking involves the ability to understand things in time and, more specifically, how things change over time, for example, how a plant, animal, or person grows or how a snowman melts under a hot sun. The concept of diachronic time is not mastered before 10 to 11 years of age (Maurice-Naville & Montangero, 1992). This set of Life Span questions uses four pictures (a baby, a child, a young man, and an old man) illustrating the biological process of aging—a man depicted at four different stages in development from infancy to old age. The child is asked three questions about the time required to go from one age to the next.
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The last question evaluates the child’s sense of time with respect to their perception of the duration of an event.
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Comments
The verbal sequences of days and months are generally learned at the beginning of elementary school, followed by the succession of years or seasons, which should be known by third to fourth grade. I have found, however, that even many middle school students receiving language services do not know the months and seasons of the year. Problems with perception of time duration are key characteristics of autism and ADHD in children and adults (Casassus et al., 2019; Weissenberger et al., 2021). They are unable to sense how much time has passed and estimate the time needed to get something done. This “time blindness” can seriously disrupt their ability to plan and complete tasks.
Many classroom and therapy activities, such as following instructions and comprehending and generating personal narratives, require students to have TK. Making plans to complete homework, science projects, or book reports requires the ability to judge time duration. Although TK underlies so many school activities, it has rarely been assessed. The TKQ provides a system for evaluating students’ time knowledge. The information gained from such an assessment can provide teachers and and SLPs with concepts that should be explicitly taught.