Abstract
In the educational field, there is a discussion about how to teach temporal concepts within Social Science in Early Childhood Education and in Primary Education. This debate arises from the young age of the students, which shows the need to make use of different teaching approaches from those used in other higher educational levels. As stories have been proved as an effective teaching method used in this educational level for the past 30 years, the research problem revolves around the following question: is it possible to teach temporal concepts in Early Childhood Education using a non-specific story to teach social sciences? For this reason, the purpose of this study was to design, implement, and assess a teaching program for the temporal concepts past/present/future, before/after, and change/transformation in the third year of Early Childhood Education using a non-specific story to teach social sciences. For a better understanding of the program, a brief explanation of the Spanish Educational system has been included. The participants of the study were the 47 students of an Early Childhood and Primary Education Center in Molina de Segura, Murcia, Spain. Quantitative data were analyzed using the software program SPSS v. 24. With the goal of evaluating the students’ achievement of each activity’s objectives, as well as the teaching program as a whole, percentages and frequencies of the assessment charts’ different components were calculated. Once the data from the brainstorming session on the students’ prior knowledge of temporal concepts had been collected, it was transcribed and organized in the corresponding chart. In this way, a primary text document was created. Together with the Initial Questionnaire on Temporal Concepts (IQTC) and the Final Self-assessment Questionnaire (FSQ), which did not require transcription, three hermeneutic categories were created, one for each document, using the program ATLAS.ti (version 7.5.2). The results showed a high percentage of fulfillment of the objectives, with somewhat significant differences between one class and another. These results lead us to conclude that the temporal concepts chosen for this teaching program can be taught in third-year Early Childhood Education classes using the story Ramona la mona by Aitana Carrasco.
Highlights
We will go through the history of the teaching of Social Science in education and, in Early Childhood Education classes
The teachers were given the Initial Questionnaire on Temporal Concepts (IQTC), which reflects their perceptions of the great importance given to temporal concepts; they are taught in their classrooms through the use of stories and sequences of images
We can see that both teachers confirm they address temporal concepts in their classrooms using the same strategies, resources, and types of activities, they employ different strategies for the spatial organization and student grouping
Summary
We will go through the history of the teaching of Social Science in education and, in Early Childhood Education classes. Cuenca (2008) and Trepat’s contributions (2011, cited in Corral and Miralles, 2014) affirm that the fundamental problem with the teaching–learning process for social sciences is the choice of content and the approach used, rather than the students’ age. Authors such as Iofciu et al (2012) and Fernández-Oliveras and Oliveras (2014) assert there is a need to change the teaching strategies used, especially at this stage. In this environment, different studies have shown that preschool students are capable of learning content related to the social sciences (Brophy and Alleman, 2006; Harnett, 2007). Other studies call into question Piaget’s assumption that children are incapable of comprehending time or a narration’s dimension of time (Almagro et al, 2006)
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