Sesame Street research

As of 2001 there were over 1,000 research studies regarding the efficacy, impact, and effect of the children's television show Sesame Street on American culture. It marked the first time research was used in the development of a children's television show. According to author Michael Davis, Sesame Street is "perhaps the most vigorously researched, vetted, and fretted-over program". By the end of the program's first season, Children's Television Workshop (CTW, the organization founded to oversee Sesame Street production) had developed what came to be called "the CTW model": a system of planning, production, and evaluation which combined the expertise of researchers and early childhood educators with that of the program's writers, producers, and directors.

As co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney has stated, "Without research, there would be no Sesame Street". CTW conducted research in two ways: in-house formative research which informed and improved production, and independent summative evaluations conducted by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) during the show's first two seasons to measure the program's educational effectiveness. CTW researchers invented tools (such as "the distractor") to measure young viewers' attention to the program. Changes based on their findings were made, and a body of objective data was compiled. The formative research on Sesame Street was the first time children's television viewing was studied scientifically.

Summative research conducted throughout Sesame Street's history demonstrated that viewing the program had positive effects on young viewers' learning, school readiness, and social skills. Two landmark evaluations conducted in 1970 and 1971 demonstrated the positive effects of the program, and subsequent studies have replicated the findings. As CTW researcher Gerald S. Lesser stated in 1974, early tests conducted on the show (both formative and summative) "suggested that Sesame Street was making strides towards teaching what it had set out to teach".

Background and development

As author Louise A. Gikow stated, what set Sesame Street apart from other children's programming was its use of research. Co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney called the idea of combining research with television production "positively heretical", because it had never been done before. When Sesame Street was created during the late 1960s, children's programming was (as Cooney later called it) a "wasteland". Other children's television shows in existence were widely criticized for being little more than cartoons depicting violence and reflecting commercial values.

The Carnegie Corporation (one of Sesame Street's first financial backers) hired Cooney during the summer of 1967 to visit experts in childhood development, education, and media across the US and Canada. She researched their ideas about the viewing habits of young children, writing a report on her findings entitled "Television for Preschool Education". Despite of her lack of experience in education, her study (which spelled out how television could be used as an aid in the education of preschool children, especially those living in inner cities) was well received. Cooney's study became the basis for Sesame Street; full funding was procured for its development and production and the creation of CTW. According to Gikow, the show's financial backers (which consisted of the US federal government, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation) insisted on "testing at critical stages to evaluate its ultimate success".

During the summer of 1968 Gerald S. Lesser, CTW's first advisory-board chairman, conducted five three-day curriculum-planning seminars in Boston and New York City to select a curriculum for the new program. Seminar participants were television producers and child-development experts. It was the first time a children's television show included a curriculum, which Palmer and his colleague Shalom M. Fisch described as "detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes". The program's creative staff was concerned that this goal would limit creativity, but one of the seminar results was to encourage the show's producers to use child-development concepts in the creative process. Some Muppet characters were created during the seminars to fill specific curriculum needs. For example, Oscar the Grouch was designed to teach children about their positive and negative emotions, and Big Bird was created to provide children with opportunities to correct his "bumbling" mistakes. Lesser reported that Jim Henson had a "particular gift for creating scenes that might teach".

Throughout the history of Sesame Street, its research staff and producers conducted internal reviews and regularly-scheduled seminars to ensure that their curriculum goals were being met and to guide future production. As of 2001, ten seminars were conducted specifically to address the literacy needs of preschool children. Curriculum seminars prior to Sesame Street's 33rd season (in 2002) resulted in changes to the show's structure and format.

The "CTW model"

Shortly after beginning Sesame Street, its creators developed what came to be called the "CTW model": a system of planning, production, and evaluation which did not fully emerge until the end of the show's first season. The CTW model consisted of four parts: the interaction of television producers and educators, the development of a curriculum for three-to-five year-old children, formative research to shape the program and independent summative research into what its viewers learned. Sesame Street researcher Rosemarie Truglio called it "a healthy tension", adding "I think the reason it works is that everyone who is a part of the model really, truly cares about children".

Cooney credited Harvard professors Gerald S. Lesser (whom CTW hired to design the program's educational objectives) and Edward L. Palmer (responsible for conducting the show's formative research) for bridging the gap between the show's producers and researchers. Cooney observed of the CTW model: "From the beginning, we—the planners of the project—designed the show as an experimental research project with educational advisers, researchers, and television producers collaborating as equal partners". She described the collaboration as an "arranged marriage".

The show's staff worked to ensure that the relationship between producers and researchers was non-adversarial; each side contributed "its own unique perspective and expertise". The production staff recognized early in Sesame Street's history that access to researchers gathering children's reactions and guiding production was a valuable resource. Researchers and production staff were viewed as a team, working together to ensure the best possible product. Researchers (as experts) advocated for children, while the show's writers and producers brought their instincts for (and past successes with) entertaining children through television. The writers were initially skeptical about their collaboration with researchers and about the curriculum but, as Stone reported, eventually came to see it as "a backbone" of the creative process.

When educational experts and producers in other countries approached CTW for assistance in producing their own versions of Sesame Street (which became known as "co-productions"), a variant of the CTW model was used. The need for preschool education in each country was accessed through research and interviews with television producers, researchers, and educational experts (as had been done in the US). Then they convened the experts in a series of meetings (held in the individual countries) to create and develop a curriculum, the program's educational goals, its set and characters. They finally held a series of meetings, at the CTW offices in New York City and in the respective country, to train the co-production team in the CTW model. Each co-production, if possible, conducted formative studies to test the efficacy of its curriculum.

Formative research

Methods

Palmer and his team used concepts from the field of formative research (in-house, laboratory-oriented research) to guide production and to see if the show held children's attention. Palmer, described by Cooney as "a founder of CTW and founder of its research function", was one of the few late-1960s academicians studying children's television and its effects on learning. He was responsible for designing and executing CTW's formative research and working with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which handled the Workshop's summative research. Palmer's work was so crucial to Sesame Street that writer Malcolm Gladwell asserted, "... Without Ed Palmer, the show would have never lasted through the first season".

CTW's researchers were strongly influenced by behaviorism (a popular movement in psychology during the late 1960s); therefore, many methods and tools used were primarily behavioral. Palmer developed "the distractor", which he used to test if the material shown on Sesame Street captured young viewers' attention. Two children at a time were brought into the laboratory and shown an episode on a television monitor and a slide show next to it. The slides would change every seven seconds; researchers recorded when the children's attention was diverted from the episode. They were able to record almost every second of Sesame Street this way; if an episode captured children's interest 80—90 percent of the time, producers would air it. However, if it only worked 50 percent of the time they would change (or remove) content.

In research during later seasons of Sesame Street, verbal measurements (in the form of letter-recognition tests) were introduced. These reinforced their results, providing more insight into children's knowledge, reactions and responses than behavioral measures alone. The "distractor" method was modified (under Workshop researchers Lewis Bernstein and Valeria Lovelace) into an "eyes-on-screen" method, which collected simultaneous data from larger groups of children. Their method also tested for more "natural" distractions (those provided by other children in group-viewing situations); up to 15 children were tested at a time. Lovelace developed additional testing methods, described by Sesame Street researcher Shalom M. Fisch as "state-of-the-art research design". One innovation included the "engagement measure", which recorded children's active responses to an episode (such as laughing or dancing to music).

Results

Palmer reported that by the fourth season of the show, the episodes rarely tested below 85 percent. At least one segment ("The Man from Alphabet"), despite its expense, was eliminated because it tested poorly with children. The distractor provided new insight into the way children watch television, and became an irreplaceable part of CTW's research on its programs' effectiveness for decades. It created a body of objective data, and marked the first time that children's television viewing was studied scientifically.

CTW's early studies with the distractor found that the program resulted in more learning when children watched carefully, or when they participated by singing (or talking) along. In re-tests four weeks later, it found that children had retained most of what they had previously learned. After the first three weeks (15 episodes), viewers and non-viewers were compared; few differences in learning were found. When both groups were tested after six weeks more differences began to appear, with viewers scoring higher than non-viewers. A two-season CTW study published in 1995 found a "significant increase" in difficulty in remembering the letter and number of the day. Based on the multiple-intelligence theory, producers began to cluster Sesame Street's short films, animations, and inserts around a single topic rather than sprinkling several topics throughout a single episode.

Summative research

ETS studies

CTW solicited the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to conduct its summative research. CTW and ETS hired and trained coordinators, testers and observers from local communities to conduct these studies. The most relevant tests of the show's effectiveness were comparisons between children who watched it regularly and those who did not. After the first season, however, Sesame Street was so widely watched that it was difficult to make this distinction; ETS began to have problems finding subjects for their non-viewing groups, which weakened the experimental design. It solved this problem by selecting control-group households from areas that did not broadcast the show. Instead of using groups of viewers and non-viewers, later large-scale studies used statistical designs and methods for estimating cause-effect relationships.

Sign at entrance to ETS headquarters; ETS conducted early summative studies on Sesame Street.

ETS (whose prestige enhanced the credibility of its findings) conducted two landmark summative evaluations in 1970 and 1971, demonstrating that Sesame Street had a significant educational impact on its viewers. These studies illustrated the early educational effects of Sesame Street, and have been cited in other studies of the effects of television on young children. ETS reported that the children who watched the show most learned the most, and achieved better results in letter-recognition skills. Three-year-olds who watched regularly scored higher than five-year-olds who did not; children from low-income households who were regular viewers scored higher than children from higher-income households who watched the show less frequently. Similar results were found in children from non-English-speaking homes. Although adult supervision was not required for children to learn the material being presented, children who watched and discussed the program with their parents gained more skills than those who did not. Children viewing the show in an informal home setting learned as much as children who watched it at school under a teacher's supervision. Regular viewers scored higher in school adjustment, had a more positive attitude toward school and better peer relations.

Despite CTW's concern that the show would widen the gap between well-to-do and poorer children, there was no evidence that this occurred; gains made by disadvantaged children were "at least as great" as those by advantaged children. The show's positive general effects (as cited by ETS) occurred across all childhood demographics (gender, age, geographic location and socioeconomic status). Studies conducted by ETS seemed to suggest that the program had "a significant impact on children's social behavior", although the evidence was not as strong as it was for cognitive effects; fewer studies exist of social behavior.

Later studies

In 1979 CTW enlisted Palmer, in conjunction with Harvard University, to conduct a study in Jamaica of the effects of Sesame Street on children with no exposure to other children's television programs (to correct for the effects of multimedia exposure on children in the US). Palmer found that Jamaican children's interest dropped during segments with the Muppets, possibly due to language differences; musical segments were the most effective. Palmer generally found that learning increased after exposure to the show, especially letter and number recognition.

In 1995 a longitudinal study was conducted at the University of Kansas, the first large-scale evaluation of Sesame Street's cognitive effects in over twenty years. Its findings supported those of previous studies: early viewing of educational children's television appeared to contribute to children's school readiness. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds learned as much as advantaged children per hour of viewing, but they did not watch enough to gain the program's maximum benefit. In comparing the effects of watching Sesame Street with other programs, commercial entertainment and cartoons had a negative effect; watching Sesame Street daily did not increase children's viewing of other categories of television, or made them less likely to participate in other educational activities.

Other studies have been conducted about the cognitive effects of Sesame Street. In 1990, a two-year longitudinal study found that viewing the show was a "significant predictor" of improved vocabulary regardless of family size, parent education, child gender or parental attitudes towards television. Another study conducted in 1990 looked at the effect of Sesame Street home videos and found gains in vocabulary, letter and word recognition and printed-word identification. It also found that the videos encouraged discussion with adults, which may have helped reinforce educational messages and content.

In 1994, research was conducted for a study entitled "The Recontact Study" (funded by the Markle Foundation) examining the effects of Sesame Street on adolescents who had watched the show as young children. The subjects had participated in previous studies as preschoolers. When the study's research subjects were statistically equated for parents' level of education, birth order, residence and gender, it found that adolescents who had watched Sesame Street as preschoolers were positively influenced by it. Compared with children who had not watched it regularly, they had higher grades in English, math, and science; read for pleasure more often; perceived themselves as more competent, and expressed lower levels of aggression. The effects were stronger in adolescent boys than adolescent girls, and there was no evidence that the show had a negative effect on creativity.

In the spring of 2001, the Workshop conducted a summative study about the effects of war, natural disasters, and other events on young children. It found that little was being done to address the fears and concerns of victims of traumatic events. As a result, the Workshop developed a series of materials it believed would help children (and their families) cope with events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

References

• Borgenicht, David (1998). Sesame Street Unpaved. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 978-0-7868-6460-7.
• Davis, Michael (2008). Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-01996-0.
• Fisch, Shalom M. (2001). "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8058-3395-9. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Cooney, Joan Ganz, "Foreword", pp. xi–xiv.
  • Truglio, Rosemarie T. and Shalom M. Fisch, "Introduction", pp. xv–xxi.
  • Palmer, Edward and Shalom M. Fisch, "The Beginnings of Sesame Street Research", pp. 3–24.
  • Lesser, Gerald S. and Joel Schneider, "Creation and Evolution of the Sesame Street Curriculum", pp. 25–38.
  • Fisch, Shalom M. and Lewis Bernstein, "Formative Research Revealed: Methodological and Process Issues in Formative Research", pp. 39–60.
  • Truglio, Rosemarie T. et al., "The Varied Role of Formative Research: Case Studies from 30 Years", pp. 61–82.
  • Mielke, Keith W., "A Review of Research on the Educational and Social Impact of Sesame Street", pp. 83–97.
  • Wright, John C. et al., "The Early Window Project: Sesame Street Prepares Children for School", pp. 97–114.
  • Huston, Aletha C. et al., "Sesame Street Viewers as Adolescents: The Recontact Study", pp. 131–146.
• Gikow, Louise A. (2009). Sesame Street: A Celebration—Forty Years of Life on the Street. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal. ISBN 978-1-57912-638-4.
• Gladwell, Malcolm (2000). The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown & Co. ISBN 978-0-316-31696-5.
• Lesser, Gerald S. (1975) [1974]. Children and Television: Lessons From Sesame Street. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-394-71448-6.
• Morrow, Robert W. (2006). Sesame Street and the Reform of Children's Television. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-8230-2.