National Center for History in the Schools

Overview

Chronological thinking is at the heart of historical reasoning. Without a clear sense of historical time-time past, present, and future-students are bound to see events as one great tangled mess. Without a strong sense of chronology-of when events occurred and in what temporal order-it is impossible for students to examine relationships among them or to explain historical causality. Chronology provides the mental scaffolding for organizing historical thought. 

In developing students' chronological thinking, an important share of instructional time should be given to the use of well-constructed historical narratives: literary narratives including biographies and historical literature, and well-written narrative histories that have the quality of "stories well told." Well-crafted narratives such as these have the power to grip and hold students' attention. Thus engaged, the reader (or young listener) is able to focus on what the narrator discloses: the temporal structure of events unfolding over time, the actions and intentions of those who were there, the temporal connections between antecedents and their consequences. 

It is these characteristics of well-structured historical narratives that probably account for the relationships that have been observed between the use of narratives and young students' developing concepts of time and temporal causation. Responding to well-chosen historical narratives, myths, stories, and fables read by the teacher, young children can determine their temporal structure-their "beginning," "middle," and "end"-and retell, reenact, or illustrate the story to put its important developments into correct temporal sequence. They might illustrate, too, the different ending that might have come about, had one of the characters chosen a different course of action-the beginnings of causal and contingency thinking in the elementary years. 

Long before young children are ready to calculate calendar time, they are able to use such concepts as "long, long ago," "long ago," "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow," and to put historical developments they have learned about in correct temporal relationships according to broad categories such as these. Children should also be developing their ability to identify examples of changes and continuity over time. Children by grade 4 have been observed to use more precise historical eras, such as the "time of empires" or the "American Revolution." By this time, mathematical understandings should be sufficiently developed to support students' meaningful use of years, decades, and centuries to calculate historical time, and to create more elaborate systems of "chronological scaffolding" on which more challenging analyses can be undertaken. 

STANDARD 1
The student thinks chronologically:
Therefore, the student is able to

1. Distinguish between past, present, and future time.
2. Identify the temporal structure of a historical narrative or story: its beginning, middle, and end (the latter defined as the outcome of a particular beginning). 
3. Establish temporal order in constructing their [students'] own historical narratives: working forward from some beginning through its development, to some end or outcome; working backward from some issue, problem, or event to explain its origins and its development over time.
4. Measure and calculate calendar time by days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. 
5. Interpret data presented in timelines.
6. Create timelines by designating appropriate equidistant intervals of time and recording events according to the temporal order in which they occurred. 
7. Explain change and continuity over time. 

>> Standard 2, Historical Comprehension