The development of diachronic thinking: 8–12‐year‐old children's understanding of the evolution of forest disease

Abstract

Very little is known about the use children make of temporal concepts in their explanations of reality. The experiment presented here concerns the development of diachronic thinking in children, i.e. their ability to situate an object of knowledge along a temporal dimension and to conceive changes of this object over time. The experimental situation concerns forest disease and explores the child's ability to understand this phenomenon and to reconstruct the stages of its evolution. A total of 52 children aged from 8 to 11 years were asked questions about the past and future states of a diseased tree. The results show that important changes take place between 8 and 11 years in the conception of the evolution involved and reveal the components of a diachronic perspective. This perspective does not only consist of imagining and ordering steps in an evolutive process. It must also include the ability to establish a link between the steps by conceiving internal transformations that produce external changes. The changes constitute a continuous and gradual sequence, going from past to future. This diachronic perspective is not completely mastered before the age of 10-11 years. Before this, children have a punctual representation, imagine a small number of steps, a short time span and do not establish links between past and future.The genetic method in psychology, first adopted by Baldwin (1906), and later by Piaget (1924Piaget ( ,1970, is at the origin of developmental psychology today. This method has contributed a great deal to the study of cognition. It involves the application to the field of psychology of a perspective which is found in other sciences (e.g. physical chemistry, Prigogine & Stengers, 1981) and which is sometimes called evolutionist (Morss, 1990;Spencer, 1855) in reference to the model constituted by the theory of biological evolution. We prefer to use the more general term of diachronic perspective, which we define as the ability to situate an event on a temporal axis and to consider it as a stage in an evolutive process.The question we wish to address here concerns the foundations of this diachronic perspective and its contributions to the development of children's thinking. Such a question, in the field of developmental psychology has, of course epistemological implications, particularly as regards the problem of the contribution of the diachronic perspective to the knowledge of reality. These implications justify our interest in * Requests for reprints.

Children's reasoning about continuous causal processes: The role of verbal and non‐verbal ability

“…Future research could directly test whether the speed of a process affects children's ability to track it during observation – consistent with Maurice‐Naville and Montangero's () reports of elementary school children's difficulties grasping the effects of slowly progressing forest disease – and whether longer timeframes demand more concentration – consistent with Rieber's () finding that fourth graders only benefited from an animated demonstration of Newton's second law when this was presented in short sequences.…”

Conceptions of time in children treated for malignant cerebellar tumours

“…The present results are congruent with previous studies showing an increase in diachronic thinking with age [31,33,35]. Indeed, certain time-related skills, such as units (TUN), rely on learning in a school setting whose curriculum is age-based [37,38].…”

“…Applied to living things, this ability entails understanding identity (stability of the individual despite physical alterations that can radically alter outward appearance), seriation (specific developmental stages cannot follow certain others and must occur first), temporal patterns of change (which can be non-linear with sudden developmental accelerations and periods of stability), time-span (invariance of the passage of time for living beings) and irreversibility (which refers to the unidirectionality of biological change, especially growth and death). As in previous studies using this evaluation with ASD children [34] or with typically-developing children [33,35], each question was accompanied by a set of four pictures illustrating the different stages of growth, from infancy to old age (infancy, childhood, adulthood and old age). In order to have more than one series of answers on Transformation, this study used two sets of pictures: one with a developing human (a man for male participants, a woman for female participants) (see Figure 1), the other set with a developing dog, a Dalmatian, which is well known because of a famous animated movie, 101 Dalmatians.…”

Time knowledge acquisition in children aged 6 to 11 years and its relationship with numerical skills

“…Life-span representations have been explored in studies of children's conceptual development in biology. For instance, the understanding of irreversibility of growth for humans, animals, and plants has been explored in typically developing children (Inagaki & Hatano, 1996;Labrell & Stefaniak, 2011;Maurice-Naville & Montangero, 1992;Rosengren, Gelman, Kalish, & McCormick, 1991) and in pediatric populations such as survivors from cerebellar tumors (Labrell, Kieffer, Grill, & Dellatolas, 2014). However, investigations examining how children estimate the duration of growth and ageing (e.g., between infancy and childhood, between childhood and adulthood, between adulthood and old age) are lacking.…”