International Impact Of Sesame Street

The globalization of Sesame Street began shortly after Sesame Street’s initial broadcast in the United States. Producers from Mexico, Brazil, and Germany independently approached CTW because they saw the value of Sesame Street, but wanted programs that would specifically address the educational needs of children in their own countries. To create the series the producers imagined, in partnership with CTW, they devised a flexible production plan that was subsequently used to create all international productions of Sesame Street. As in the United States, the various series were produced under the CTW Model, with indigenous producers, educational content specialists, and researchers. To date, 20 different adaptations of the series have been created in countries such as Brazil, China, Germany, Norway, Mexico, Poland, Russia, and Spain.

In working outside the United States, theWorkshop’s design is not to impose American culture or approaches, but instead, to provide a framework for a series created in-country by a local production team. Sets reflective of a given culture are created and inhabited by characters developed specifically for each adaptation, giving the local viewers a cast that participates in activities and situations that meaningfully reflect the lives of the programs’ viewers. The production in Germany, for example, features a German bear who wears sneakers; in Mexico, the studio segments take place in a colorful plaza populated by Abelardo, a bright green parrot, a grouch character called Poncho the Contrarian, and others. Fifty percent or less of the program content is material dubbed fromCTW’s international library of segments. These segments are selected by the local production team for their pertinence to a given program’s educational goals. The result is that when children view Sesame Street, they view a program that has the same essence as the domestic series, in a context that reflects local values and educational priorities of a specific country (Cole, Richman, & McCann Brown, 2001; Gettas, 1990).

This localization has led international coproductions of Sesame Street to reflect a range of educational priorities. Although the curricula contain elements in common (e.g., numeracy, literacy, perceptual skills), each has unique aspects that educators have identified as of critical importance to children in their countries. For example, the Chinese curriculum contained a section devoted to aesthetics because specialists felt it is an area
that has sometimes been deemphasized in school curricula but is important to children living in their culture. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, a primary focus was teaching children mutual respect and understanding. A critical element of the production in Russia was preparing children for life in their new open society. In this way, each series has provided educational messages on some of the broad curricular areas that are common to preschoolers around the globe, as well as educational content that more specifically addresses local children’s needs.

Thanks to this broad range of subject matter, research on the various Sesame Street coproductions has provided opportunities both to assess the impact of Sesame Street across cultures and to gauge the potential of television to convey educational content not addressed in the curriculum of the domestic Sesame Street. Like the research conducted in support of the U.S. version of Sesame Street, research on the coproductions includes both formative and summative work. Formative research has examined a wide range of issues, such as the development of studio sets (Gemark, 1993; Kirwil, 1996a; Plaza Sésamo IV Department of Research & Content, 1993) and characters (Kirwil, 1996b; Ulitsa Sezam Department of Research & Content, 1996), as well as the appeal and comprehensibility of specific segments or episodes.

One of the earliest studies of Sesame Street coproductions was also one of the most comprehensive. Researchers in Mexico conducted a controlled experimental study of children’s learning from Plaza Sésamo
(Diaz-Guerrero & Holtzman, 1974). A sample of 221 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were randomly assigned to either an experimental group that regularly viewed the program for 6 months, or a control group that viewed alternative children’s programming. Researchers evaluated children’s pre and postviewing performance on a battery of tests representing various skills in the Plaza Sésamo curriculum. Children who had regularly viewed the program performed better than their nonviewing peers on tests of general knowledge, numbers, letters, and word skills. The researchers also noted differences in performance on cognitive tests (e.g., classification, relational skills) and oral comprehension. Gains differed by age, with 4-year-olds benefitting most from watching and 3-year-olds, the least.

Years later, a study in Turkey (Sahin, 1992) noted similar effects of Susam Sokagi, the Turkish adaptation of Sesame Street. The study evaluated pre- and postbroadcast performance on a range of curricular skills among 1,166 children between the ages of three and six. Comparing same-age peers before and after exposure to the broadcast, children who watched the program performed better on a range of curricular skills (e.g., literacy, numeracy), even when factors such as maturation and mother’s education were taken into consideration.

A smaller scale study was used to evaluate Rua Sésamo, the Portugese adaptation of Sesame Street. The researcher (Brederode-Santos, 1993) devised a multicomponent study that brought together a compendium
of information including ratings data, surveys of parents and teachers, and pre–post viewing data from a small quasiexperimental study of 36 children in a Lisbon kindergarten. The study indicated that the reach of the program was extensive, with as much as 95% of the sample of the target population (3- to 7-year-olds) having some exposure to the program.

Regarding parents’ perspectives, the researcher noted that a majority of the parents considered the program educational and felt that the children were learning from it. An analysis of the study of children’s learning revealed trends similar to those noted in other summative evaluations, with the greatest gains in language and numeracy skills.

Similar gains in numeracy and literacy were also found in a study in Mexico (UNICEF, 1996). The researchers studied 3- to 6-year-olds from low-income families in Mexico City (382 children) and Oaxaca (396 children). In both cities, participants were randomly assigned to a high-exposure group who regularly viewed Plaza Sésamo in their school classrooms for a 3-month period, or a low-exposure group that watched
cartoons. Comparisons of performance on a battery of curriculum-based tests indicated findings in the area of symbolic representation (letter recognition, numeric skills) and geometric shapes. There was also some evidence of gains in the areas of ecology, nutrition, and hygiene in the Mexico City group.

The study also serves as a reminder of an aspect of general summative research design that must be accommodated by researchers. Although there was an attempt to create “experimental” and “control” groups, at the time of the study the reach of Plaza Sésamo was so great that it was not possible to know the degree of incidental exposure children had to the program. In the case of the study in Mexico, it was believed, for example, that it was likely that children in the control group had at least minimal exposure to the program outside of the school setting. To control for this difficulty, researchers used an admittedly imperfect proxy measure of exposure.

They included in their analysis a variable that looked at children’s familiarity with the Plaza Sésamo characters, reasoning that children who demonstrated familiarity with the characters were likely to have had exposure to the program.

In contrast, a study in Russia provided a unique opportunity to address this issue of exposure systematically. The program in Russia was initially broadcast in only some regions of the country. Researchers elected to evaluate the impact of the program in a geographical area beyond the broadcast reach, something that enabled the researchers to compare the performance of children who had viewed videotapes of the 65 episodes to that of children who had watched animated Russian fairy tales. Results of the study indicated that, although the most powerful predictor of children’s performance was age, viewers of Ulitsa Sezam developed some numeracy and literacy skills at a faster rate than their nonviewing peers (Ulitsa Sezam Department of Research and Content, 1998).

Around the world, the pattern of results that has emerged from summative evaluations of Sesame Street coproductions is noteworthy, not only for the consistency of effects across coproductions, but also because
the pattern is so consistent with effects that have been observed for the original version of Sesame Street in the United States. I will return to this point later.
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