Learning about school: the development of kindergartners' school scripts.

Abstract

This research examined the development of a general event representation and the relationship between general and specific event memories. Kindergarten children were interviewed about the school-day routine 4 times during the first 3 months of school. Even on the second day of school, children's reports were general and well organized, and the organization remained stable over time. With increasing experience, children reported more acts and more conditional statements, indicating that the representation became more elaborate and more temporally complex over time. Furthermore, children shared a remarkably common representation of the routine. All children tended to mention those acts that occupied a particular time and place in the classroom, and each of these acts seemed to encompass a list of possible activities in a hierarchic fashion. In contrast to the ease with which children reported the general routine, children had difficulty recalling specific episodes of the day before at all 4 interviews. These results indicate that children represent an event as a general spatial-temporal framework based on the first experience with a new routine; this framework becomes more elaborate and the temporal and the hierarchical organization of the representation becomes more complex with increasing experience with the event.