Summative research on the domestic version of Sesame Street has taken two forms. Several major studies in the 1970s and 1990s assessed the short- and long-term impact of sustained viewing of the series over a period of several months. Other, smaller scale research focused on immediate effects of limited exposure to one or more brief segments taken from Sesame Street. Each will be considered in turn.
Effects of Sustained Viewing
Early Research on Impact. The educational impact of Sesame Street was first documented in a pair of studies conducted by the Educational Testing Service (ETS; Ball & Bogatz, 1970; Bogatz & Ball, 1971). The first of these studies, conducted after the first season of production was completed, assessed Sesame Street’s impact on a variety of cognitive skills.
The participants were a geographically and ethnically diverse sample of nearly 1,000 children aged 3 to 5 (most of whom were considered to be from disadvantaged backgrounds). The children were either encouraged or not encouraged to watch Sesame Street (at home or at school) during a 26-week period; across the sample, exposure ranged from zero times per week to more than five. Before and after this 26-week exposure, the children were tested via an extensive battery of measures that covered several dimensions: knowledge of the alphabet and numbers, names of body parts, recognition of forms, knowledge of relational terms, and sorting and classification skills.
The results of the study indicated that exposure to Sesame Street produced the desired educational effects. Those children who watched the most showed the greatest pretest–posttest gains, and the areas that showed the strongest effects were those that had been emphasized the most in Sesame Street (e.g., letters). These effects held across age (although 3-year-olds showed the greatest gains, presumably because they knew the
least when they came to the series), sex, geographic location, socioeconomic status (SES; with low-SES children showing greater gains than middle-SES children), native language (English or Spanish), and whether
the children watched at home or in school.
The second ETS study (Bogatz&Ball, 1971) consisted of two components. One was a replication of the earlier study, using Season 2 shows that had been produced under a revised and expanded educational curriculum. This study confirmed the earlier results, finding significant gains in many of the same areas and in new areas that had been added in the second season (e.g., roles of community members, counting to 20
rather than 10).
The second component was a follow-up study that reexamined 283 of the children from the Season 1 study (Ball & Bogatz, 1970), about one half of whom had begun school in the interim. Teachers were asked to rate all of the children in their classes on several dimensions (e.g., verbal readiness, quantitative readiness, attitude toward school, relationship with peers), without knowing which ones had been Sesame Street viewers or were participating in the study. Results showed that, contrary to the claims of critics of Sesame Street, viewers were not bored, restless, or passive when they entered a formal classroom experience. Rather, frequent Sesame Street viewers were rated as better prepared for school than their non- or low-viewing classmates.
These findings were challenged by critics of Sesame Street, most notably by Thomas Cook and his colleagues (1975). They argued that the effects observed in the ETS studies did not reflect merely the effect of watching
Sesame Street; instead, these researchers felt that the effects reflected a combination of viewing and parents’ involvement in the viewing experience. In fact, Cook’s point was not without merit, as subsequent research
has shown that young children’s learning from television can be affected by parental coviewing and commentary (e.g., Reiser, Tessmer, & Phelps, 1984; Reiser,Williamson,&Suzuki, 1988; see chap. 9, this volume). Yet, parental involvement was not solely responsible for the ETS findings.
Even when Cook et al. conducted a reanalysis of the ETS data, controlling for other potentially contributing factors such as mothers’ discussing Sesame Street with their children, the ETS effects were reduced but many remained statistically significant. Such effects could not simply be explained through parental involvement; Sesame Street itself made a significant contribution.
Subsequent Studies. The results described above are echoed and extended by several more recent studies on the effects of viewing Sesame Street. A 3-year longitudinal study, conducted at the University of Kansas,
examined the impact of educational television (primarily Sesame Street) on school readiness by tracking approximately 250 low-SES children from either age 2 to age 5 or from age 4 to age 7 (Wright, Huston, Murphy, et al., 2001;Wright, Huston, Scantlin,&Kotler, 2001). The study took into account not only viewing of Sesame Street and other educational series, but viewing of all television, as well as nontelevision activities (e.g., reading, music, use of video games) and numerous contextual variables that have been found to affect academic achievement (e.g., parents’ own level of education, native language, preschool attendance). At regular intervals over the 3 years, children were tested with a broad range of measures, including standard tests such as the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and Woodcock-Johnson Letter–Word Recognition Test.
The results of the study indicated that preschool children who watched educational programs—and Sesame Street in particular—spent more time reading and engaged in educational activities. In addition, these children
performed significantly better than their peers on tests of letter–word knowledge, mathematics skills, vocabulary size, and school readiness on age-appropriate standardized achievement tests. These differences were consistent with earlier findings on the long-term impact of Sesame Street on children’s learning of vocabulary (Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990), and remained significant even after the effects of various mediating variables (e.g., parents’ educational level, primary language spoken at home) were removed statistically. In addition, long-term effects were found when children subsequently entered school; for example, consistent with the earlier Bogatz and Ball (1971) data, teachers more often rated Sesame Street viewers as well-adjusted to school.
A second study (Zill, 2001) was a correlational analysis of data from a national survey of the parents of approximately 10,000 children, originally collected for the U.S. Department of Education’s National Household Education Survey in 1993. This analysis found that preschoolers who viewed Sesame Street were more likely to be able to recognize letters of the alphabet and tell connected stories when pretending to read. These effects were strongest among children from low-income families, and held true even after the effects of other contributing factors (e.g., parental reading, preschool attendance, parental education) were removed statistically.
In addition, when they subsequently entered first and second grade, children who had viewed Sesame Street as preschoolers were also more likely to be reading storybooks on their own and less likely to require
remedial reading instruction. It is important to note that, because Zill’s (2001) data are correlational, they do not conclusively indicate a causal relationship between Sesame Street viewing and these various educational outcomes. Nevertheless, they are highly suggestive and consistent with data from the University of Kansas study.
Finally, the longest-ranging evidence for the impact of Sesame Street is a “recontact” study conducted at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Kansas (Anderson et al., 2001; Anderson,
Huston,Wright,&Collins, 1998; Huston, Anderson,Wright, Linebarger, &Schmitt, 2001). This study examined 570 high school students who either had or had not watched Sesame Street as preschoolers. Results indicated that preschool viewing of educational television programs such as Sesame Street was significantly related to higher grades in English, mathematics, and science in high school. For boys, the effect of watching Sesame Street 5 days per week translated into a grade point average difference of .35 (the difference, for example, between a B+ and an A-); for girls, it translated into a difference of .10.1
In addition, those teenagers who had viewed Sesame Street as preschoolers also used books more often, showed higher academic self-esteem, and placed a higher value on academic performance. These differences held true even after the students’ early language skills as preschoolers and family background variables were factored out.
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