Concepts
About relations among Time, Distance and Velocity in Children:
I. Time and Velocity
F. Matsuda |
Purposes
of the present study were to reveal developmental processes of relational
concepts among time, distance, and velocity. To achieve the purposes,
the author not only prepared formally symmetric tasks as a whole
for the three concepts, but also pursued symmetric expressions of
attributes of the three concepts as much as possible. Children from
4 to 10 years old and adults were used as subjects. In this paper
only data about the relation between time and velocity with constant
distance were analyzed and reported. The main results were as follows:
(a) In young children under 6 and a half years old, the relation
between time and velocity seemed to be rather direct. In addition
almost all children over 8 years old understood the inverse relation
between time and velocity. (b) Gaining consciousness of and verbalizing
processes of intuitive judgments were very difficult even when they
could correctly judge the relation. (c) Most children under 9 years
old seemed to judge based not on the time-distance-velocity system
but based on the coordination of two by two relations.
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