Weisberg Deena Skolnick, Richert Rebekah A
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Villanova University, Villanova, PA 19085, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2022 Sep;221:105445. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105445. Epub 2022 May 5.
Fictional stories for children are often designed to teach new information such as vocabulary words and problem-solving solutions. Past work has shown that children can learn real-world information from these fictional sources, but we do not yet understand the full scope of how different variables affect this learning process. The articles in this special issue aimed to address this question, paying particular attention to the ways in which the fantastical elements that are so common in children's media might affect their learning. In this editorial introduction, we draw out common themes from these articles and identify open questions in this field. Specifically, although there is clearly more work to be done, these articles demonstrate that fantasy can sometimes benefit children's learning, that learning is affected by children's prior knowledge and by how the educational information is integrated into the story, and that it is important to disentangle the type of target educational information (e.g., new facts vs. executive function strategies) from the type of fictional context used to teach it.
儿童小说往往旨在传授新信息，如词汇和解决问题的方法。过去的研究表明，儿童可以从这些虚构来源中学到现实世界的信息，但我们尚未完全了解不同变量如何影响这一学习过程。本期特刊中的文章旨在解决这个问题，特别关注儿童媒体中常见的奇幻元素可能影响他们学习的方式。在这篇编辑引言中，我们提炼出这些文章的共同主题，并确定该领域的开放性问题。具体而言，虽然显然还有更多工作要做，但这些文章表明，奇幻有时可以促进儿童的学习，学习受到儿童先前知识以及教育信息如何融入故事的影响，并且区分用于传授目标教育信息的虚构背景类型（例如，新事实与执行功能策略）与目标教育信息类型很重要。
