Το σχήμα και ο αριθμός ως αναπαραστασιακά εργαλεία επίλυσης προβλημάτων χρονικών σχέσεων

Time is a complex concept. As such, its understanding and manipulation on a cognitive level develops slowly during childhood and adolescence. The present study examines problem-solving, reasoning and metacognitive abilities of schoolaged children on temporal-relation problems. It also examines the influence of different representationalmeans of time quantification, i.e., numerical and figural, on children’s performance. This research concerns 233 school-aged children, which were presented with seven problems. They were first asked to answer each problem. After solving the problem, half of the children were asked to represent the described temporal relations in numbers and then in figures, whereas the other half had to represent the problem in the opposite order. After each representation, children were asked to check their original answer to the problem, with the option to either maintain it or revise it. Results show that for school-aged children: (a) “initial temporal order” is a difficult concept to grasp compared to the concepts of “final order” and “duration of events”; b) the use of numbers leads to adequate representation of time and facilitates the figural one, whereas the opposite pattern was not observed; and c) up to 10 years of age, children’s meta-cognitive, and especially selfcorrection capacity, seems to be very poor.