One way to support young children's factual learning is through shared book reading (reading books with a knowledgeable other). Many books that teach factual content are narrative in structure, in which factual content is embedded within a fictional storyline. However, there are gaps in our understanding of factors influencing children's factual…

Pretend play is often hypothesized in a global sense to be an effective context for young children's learning, but there is much still to learn about whether all types of information can be learned equally and whether all types of pretend play are equally beneficial. The present study tests whether preschoolers can learn a simple, novel causal…

Maternal and paternal teaching sequences directed to their preschool children in a naturalistic home environment were investigated. The sample included 37 middle-class sibling dyads, aged four and six, and both their mothers and fathers during ongoing interactions in the home for six 90-minute sessions. Sequences of parent-child teaching were…

There is a need for empirically based educational practices shown to support learning, yet validation tends to require a high degree of experimental control that can limit ecological validity and translation to classrooms. We describe our iterative intervention design to support preschoolers' vocabulary through book reading coupled with playful…

Previous research suggests that 3-year-olds fail to learn from statistical data when their prior beliefs conflict with evidence. Are children's beliefs entrenched in their folk theories, or can preschoolers rationally update their beliefs? Motivated by a Bayesian account, we conducted a training study to investigate this question. Children (45…

In three experiments, 3 1/2- to 6-year-old children were presented with analogical problems in which the protagonists were either real people or fantasy characters. Children were more likely to transfer solutions from the stories about real people rather than the stories about fantasy characters. These results suggest that the use of a fantasy…