Department of Psychology, University of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510, USA.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Villanova University, Villanova, PA 19085, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Mar;203:105047. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105047. Epub 2020 Dec 15.
Educational media often contain fantastical information. Although some prior research suggests that this information interferes with children's learning, other work shows that fantasy benefits learning under certain circumstances. To investigate this issue and to clarify how different types of fantastical events might affect children's learning, we presented preschoolers (N = 99 in Study 1; N = 101 in Study 2) with stories that contained events that violated real-world physical laws, violated real-world biological laws, or did not violate any real-world laws. Within each story, we embedded two pieces of educational information, one each from the domains of biology and physics, to test (a) whether there are benefits of fantastical information on learning and (b) whether such benefits are domain specific. Across both studies, we found that children generally learned both types of information best from the story with physical violations, suggesting that such events can bolster children's learning.
教育媒体中常常包含奇幻信息。虽然一些先前的研究表明这些信息会干扰儿童的学习，但其他研究表明，在某些情况下，奇幻内容有益于学习。为了探究这个问题并阐明不同类型的奇幻事件可能如何影响儿童的学习，我们向学龄前儿童（研究 1 中为 99 名，研究 2 中为 101 名）呈现了包含违反现实世界物理定律、违反现实世界生物定律或不违反任何现实世界定律的事件的故事。在每个故事中，我们嵌入了两个教育信息，一个来自生物学领域，一个来自物理学领域，以测试：(a) 奇幻信息对学习是否有益；以及 (b) 这种益处是否具有领域特异性。在这两项研究中，我们发现孩子们通常从包含物理违规的故事中学到这两种类型的信息最好，这表明此类事件可以增强孩子们的学习效果。
