Sesame Street research
Summative research conducted over the years, including two landmark evaluations in 1970 and 1971, demonstrated that viewing the program had positive effects on young viewers' learning, school readiness, and social skills.
[3] Before Sesame Street, most television shows aimed at children were locally produced, with hosts who, according to researchers Edward L. Palmer and Shalom M. Fisch, "represented the scope and vision of a single individual"[4] and were often condescending to their audience.
The show's financial backers, which consisted of the U.S. federal government, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation,[2][11] insisted on "testing at critical stages to evaluate its ultimate success".
[2] 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[12][note 2] to select a curriculum for the new program.
[14] The show's research staff and producers conducted regular internal reviews and seminars to ensure that their curriculum goals were being met and to guide future production.
[7] Shortly after beginning Sesame Street, its creators developed the "CTW model": a system of planning, production, and evaluation which only emerged after the show's first season.
"[3] Cooney credited Palmer and his colleague at Harvard, Gerald S. Lesser, whom CTW hired to write the program's educational objectives, for bridging the gap between producers and researchers.
[3] The show's staff worked to create a non-adversarial relationship between producers and researchers; each side contributed, as Fisch stated, "its own unique perspective and expertise".
[35][36] They were able to assess 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.
[33] CTW's early studies with the distractor found that children learned more when they watched the program carefully, or when they participated by singing or talking along.
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.
[49] ETS, whose prestige enhanced the credibility of its findings,[50] conducted two landmark summative evaluations in 1970 and 1971, demonstrating that Sesame Street had a significant educational impact on its viewers.
[56] The show's positive general effects, as cited by ETS, occurred across all childhood demographics (gender, age, geographic location and socioeconomic status).
[58] 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.
[49] Another study conducted in 1990 looked at the effect of Sesame Street home videos and discovered gains in vocabulary, letter, and printed- and spoken-word identification.
[49] In 1994, research was conducted for "The Recontact Study", funded by the Markle Foundation, which examined the effects of Sesame Street on adolescents who had watched the show as young children.
[61] 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.
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.
Their attention spans, as determined by the duration of time they looked at the stimuli, significantly increased at six to twenty-four months, but only for the Sesame Street material.
When older infants (age fourteen weeks to twelve months) looked at Sesame Street materials and human faces, their attention increased compared to other types of stimuli.
[65] In 2010, researchers at the University of Michigan studied the effect of combining video clips of Sesame Street and related print materials, online activities, and teacher training and mentoring on learning.
[70] The researchers showed 70 three- to five-year old children a nine-minute clip from a Sesame Street episode about aspects of Hispanic culture, introducing it to them as either "fun" or "for learning".
It could have also been due to differences in interview questions, this study's small sample size, or random chance; Bonus and Mares recognized that more experiments needed to be conducted.
[73] Pollster Frank Luntz found in 2018 that almost two-thirds of those he surveyed believed Sesame Street "represents 'the best of America' and that it stands for 'timeless values'".
[74] Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine of the University of Maryland, in response to the lack of studies on Sesame Street's effects on improving longer-term outcomes for disadvantaged children, conducted "a large-scale examination of the impact of the introduction of Sesame Street on elementary school performance" in 2019[75] and its effect on longer-term educational and labor market outcomes.
[76] They also found that children who were able to watch the show were fourteen percent more likely to attend the grade that was appropriate for their age during their middle and high school years.
[76] Kearney and Levine studied the effects of exposure to Sesame Street programming content on indictors of early school performance, ultimate educational attainment, and labor market outcomes.
Kearney and Levine built upon the existing body of early, targeted evidence and found positive impacts on the educational performance of preschool-aged children who were able to watch the show because they resided in areas with wider broadcast coverage.
These children achieved relative increases in grade-for-age status and represents improvements in academic progress during elementary school, when students are more likely to fall behind their appropriate grade level.
