How, when, and what do young children learn from fictional stories?

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.