Children's Time Knowledge as a Predictor of Age and Learning Maturity

Abstract

Time knowledge play an important role in the development of a child, helping him to organize and plan his or her daily activities, also being one of the structures of self-consciousness of a developing personality. The literature on developmental psychology describes in sufficient detail the formation of a child's ideas about duration and time sequences, but it is not completely clear whether the child's notions about time are related to his or her general age maturity or to the individual level of intellectual development. This paper describes the experience of using a modified Questionnaire of Children's Knowledge about the Time of F. Labrell et al. in the Russian-language adaptation, analyzing in detail the various aspects of the child's ideas about time. Additionally, the level of intellectual development of children according to the Raven test, the indicators of the formation of universal learning activities (ULA) of analysis and planning according to the PL-modified method were studied, and the age of children in months was also recorded. The study involved 57 normally developing students of grades 1-4 of Moscow schools (intelligence data were obtained for 31 students, and ULA data were obtained for 13 students). The results of the study demonstrate that the time knowledge can be considered as an indicator of a child's age maturity, independent of his intellectual abilities. Also the correlation between a child's knowledge of time and the formation of ULA of planning was found.