DOES EXPERIENCE WITH LARGE MAGNITUDES IN AN EVERYDAY CONTEXT FACILITATE ACCURATE ESTIMATION OF LONG TIME PERIODS IN GEOSCIENCE? A STUDY OF INDONESIAN CHILDREN

The Next Generation Science Standards emphasize the role of crosscutting concepts like scale, proportion, and quantity as constructs that impact all the sciences. This is clearly the case in geoscience where many processes occur on spatial and temporal scales far outside human experience. Beyond lack of experience with large scale phenomena, geoscience novices also often have poor conceptions of the magnitudes of the numbers used to describe them. Most research investigating learners’ conceptions of large spatial and long temporal scales has been conducted in countries where students have few opportunities to experience large magnitudes in an everyday context. Unlike US learners, Indonesian children regularly use currency units in the thousands and millions. This study investigated whether their everyday experience with large magnitudes might transfer when estimating the size of time periods encountered when learning geoscience. Thirty-nine 11-13-year-old Indonesian children completed a written questionnaire, and thirty-six were individually interviewed. Learners estimated the magnitudes of time periods associated with geoscience events up to 10 billion years. A model (Landy, Silbert, & Goldin, 2013) used to explain how people estimate the magnitude of large cardinal numbers was applied to the data. In general, children estimated the magnitudes of long time periods and familiar, analogous monetary units in the same way. Over one-third estimated the magnitude of time periods up to 10 billion years accurately, exceeding what would be expected based upon prior research with children this age who lack everyday experience with large quantities. About half of them treated successive powers of as a count sequence where a number in the sequence is obtained by adding rather than multiplying (i.e., 1 million is 100 thousand + 1 more), a strategy that produces severe underestimation of the magnitude of long time periods. Results suggest a similarity in magnitude estimation strategies for long time periods and large numbers. Findings have implications for ways to improve the teaching of temporal and probably spatial thinking in geoscience, especially from a cross-cultural perspective.