Summarizes all his work on perception of deep time, among 10-11 year olds, 17 year olds, pre-service teachers, and in-service teachers.
10-11 year olds have 2 clusters for events in geologic history (extremely ancient and less ancient), whereas teachers have three clusters (extremely ancient, less ancient and geologically recent). In both groups, assigning events to the right cluster works ok, but within cluster there is widespread confusion about order of events.
All groups of participants did better on relative dates than absolute; in fact their performance on relative dating deteriorated when time in absolute numbers was introduced.
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