Tell Me About Your Visit With the Lions: Eliciting Event Narratives to Examine Children’s Memory and Learning During Summer Camp at a Local Zoo

School-aged children often participate in school field trips, summer camps or visits at informal learning institutions like zoos and museums. However, relatively little is known about children’s memory and learning from these experiences, what types of event details and facts are retained, how retention varies across age, and whether different patterns are observed for different types of experiences. We aimed to answer these questions through a partnership with a local zoo. Four- to 10-year-old children (N = 122) participated in a weeklong summer camp, during which they engaged in dynamic events, including visits to zoo animals. On the last day of camp, we elicited autobiographical event narratives for two types of experiences: a child-selected animal event (visit to their favorite animal) and an experimenter-selected animal event. We coded event narratives for length and breadth using previously used autobiographical memory (AM) narrative coding schemes. In addition, we created a coding scheme to examine retention of semantic information (facts). We report the types of autobiographical event details and facts children recalled in their narratives, as well as age group differences that were found to vary depending on the type of information and type of event. Through this naturalistic, yet controlled, study we gain insights into how children remember and learn through hands-on activities and exploration in this engaging and dynamic environment. We discuss how our results provide novel information that can be used by informal learning institutions to promote children’s memory and retention of science facts.

A Self-Centered Story about Yourself in the Text of Literary Autobiography

The article demonstrates the narrator’scomplexity in the autobiographical text of the literary biography at the basis of which egocentrism lies as a principle of this prose type construing. Layering refers both to the author and to the narrator. However, layering of the author causes a change of the narrator’s point of view and its transfer to the 3-rd person’s narration while layering of the narrator is caused by a temporary interval between the time of the narration and the time of the autobiographical event. Ambivalence and a poly discourse character of the autobiographical narration are determined by an ability of the speech person to create texts of different genres and various types.

Communicating temporal information about autobiographical events

The communication of temporal information about autobiographical events was investigated by asking 39 pairs of adults to describe to each other a remote autobiographical event. Each member of the participant pairs was then asked to date the event which they had described and also to date the event which was described to them. The date when the event narrator stated their event happened was compared with the date when the listener stated the event happened. Four different temporal communication strategies were identified. It was rare for individuals to communicate temporal information by giving a calendar date. Rather, the narrator gave either a life theme or chronological age, as a cue to when the event happened. The listener appears to use these cues in combination with their autobiographical knowledge, and an estimate of the narrator's age to produce a temporal information communication outcome.