SOME ASPECTS OF TEMPORAL REASONING BY YOUNG-CHILDREN

The purpose of this article is to present two experiments investigatin g the ability of children. aged 4, 5 to 7 years to reason about tempor al problems. The first experiment indicates that within the same probl em space, temporal problems are not found by children to be of equal c omplexity, and secondly that children throughout the age range investi gated were able to solve temporal problems with varying sophistication . The second experiment continued the investigation of temporal proble m solving using a computer based task. Children's performance was comp ared when were given feedback about the effectiveness of their solutio ns and when no feedback was given. The data suggested firstly, that fe edback contributes to the level of sophistication of the solutions off ered rather than to overall success, and secondly that the feedback co ndition contributes to an understanding of the problem space such that children who were given feedback were more effective problem solvers in a subsequent retest.