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EDUCATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS OF SESAME STREET.
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ETS evaluations, preparation for school, effects on vocabulary, social skills. Home videocassettes, goals.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
ETS evaluations, preparation for school, effects on vocabulary, social skills. Home videocassettes, goals.
Paper Introduction:
The volume of research associated with SESAME STREET--research into production issues, educational effects, theoretical issues--is without equal in the entire field of educational television. Even so, as society changes, significant questions continue to arise, and CTW continues to research them. SESAME STREET is a continuing experiment, and is treated as such. This paper sets out some of the highlights on what is known now, based on research about the educational effectiveness of SESAME STREET.
Among the most frequently cited documents in the research literature on children's television, and the most elaborate studies to date on the effects of SESAME STREET, are the Educational Testing Service (ETS) evaluations of SESAME STREET's first two seasons. The first-season ETS study investigated SESAME STREET's impact on the development of specific cognitive
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The latter wasused as a comparison group to factor out the contributions to apparentgains of maturation and repeated-testing from pre-test to post-test. "'Motherese' of Mr. Rogers: A Description of the Dialogue of Educational Television Programs." Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 51, 282-7.Rice, M. 13, 251-274.Paulson, F. F. Lemish and M. Vol. Rice, "Television as a Talking Picture Book: AProp for Language Acquisition," Journal of Children's Language, Vol. The InternationalConference on Adaptations of SESAME STREET was held September 4-7, 199 inAmsterdam, The Netherlands. [2]Quartile 4 (Q4) = children who watched more than five times a week;Q3 = children who watched the show on the average of four or five times aweek; Q2 = children who watched the show on the average of two to threetimes a week; Q1 = children who rarely or never watched the show. Researchers classified children's verbalizations into fourcategories: 1) designating objects on television, 2) asking questionsabout television content, 3) repetition of television dialogue, and 4)describing television objects. SESAME STREET is a continuing experiment, and is treatedas such. In 1974,Paulson examined the effectiveness of SESAME STREET's third season inteaching cooperation to preschoolers. CTW will continue to use experience and research as guidancefor meeting the needs of children in the nineties and beyond. BibliographyBall, S. 3 (199 ): 421-8. New York, 199 .----------------------- [1]A recently compiled SESAME STREET research bibliography database hasover 1, entries: SESAME STREET Research Bibliography: Selectedcitations relating to SESAME STREET, 1969-1989 (New York: Children'sTelevision Workshop, June, 199 ). Researchers commented that " . [8]This "encouragement" was the means by which ETS sought originally toget the experimental group to view, while "no encouragement" was given tothe control group. A recent study exploring the use of SESAMESTREET home videocassettes in the natural home setting provides furtherevidence that children learn vocabulary and other language skills fromSESAME STREET. T. These mothers were more likely than their nonwatching peers todiscuss the program with their children and to give it high marks. The second-year follow-up investigation conducted by ETS with 283 disadvantagedchildren from the first study indicated that: . Curriculum areas focus on appreciating the diversity of human life and perspectives. The author states: Consider, for example, children at the age of 4: [four years] in the pre-test. Presented at the International Conference on Adaptations of SESAME STREET, September 4-7, 199 .SESAME STREET Research Bibliography: Selected Citations Relating to SESAME STREET, 1969-1989. Leon. Haight. [16]Yankelovich and Shulman. Ball. [15]F. If nothing else happened, their scores six months later would be similar to those at the age of 4:6 [four years, six months]. . [18]N. . L., A. Wright. SESAME STREET is cost-effective; thus it merits such strong support,both here and abroad. Scores were compared to scores of children of the sameage who had not seen SESAME STREET, to factor out gains due to maturationalfactors. D., H. Two age groups of children were followed:three-year-olds and five-year-olds who, by the end of the study, had turnedfive and seven, respectively. Simplified dialogue is not evident in children's cartoons or in adult situation comedies.[12] Research shows that SESAME STREET home videocassettes enhancelanguage and number skills. and M. It is recognized worldwide as a beneficial experience forchildren. I think our evaluation showed that an hour a day of viewing attention-holding educational tele- vision can have a positive impact on young children.[1 ] Research shows that SESAME STREET enhances language skills. My pillow is a rectangle!"). 26, No. - Symbolic Representation. Bogatz, The First Year of SESAME STREET: AnEvaluation (Princeton: Educational Testing Service, October, 197 ). Tamkin, S.Weber (Eds.), SESAME STREET Revisted (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,1975). Twenty children, ages two to five, and their familiesparticipated in this one-year study. L. 22, No. A primary means of presenting new information on SESAME STREET is through dialogue and narration that is adjusted to young viewers' comprehension levels in a manner stri- kingly similar to the way adults adjust their speech and language to young children in live interactions.[11] The dialogue on SESAME STREET closely resembles that of a mother talking to her child, with simple sentences, much talk about the here and now, repeated emphasis on key terms, and an avoidance of abstract terminology. . T. [3]The experimental design and methods of analyses for the ETSevaluation of SESAME STREET are complex and detailed. Truglio, J. Haight, "'Motherese' of Mr. Rogers: ADescription of the Dialogue of Educational Television Programs," Journal ofSpeech and Hearing Disorders, 51, 282-7. SESAME STREET also helped children prepare for school. [1 ]Children's Television Workshop, SESAME STREET Research: ATwentieth Anniversary Symposium (New York, 199 ). benefited children's television as no other show has done before or since. "Words from SESAME STREET: Learning Vocabulary While Viewing." Developmental Psychology. Acrossthe six-week measurement period in 199 , SESAME STREET has consistentlyreached 63.3 percent of all U.S. Rice and P. C. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975.Lemish, D. Large audiences make for small costs per viewing.The United States has over 92 million television households, and 16.3million of those have at least one child under six years of age. Research shows that SESAME STREET teaches social skills. (Princeton: Educational Testing Service,November, 1971). Cook, H. They proposedthat television be construed as a "talking picture book," with greatpotential as a vehicle for teaching vocabulary. The goals of SESAMESTREET keep evolving and growing. Bogatz. C. SESAME STREET Revisited. Information was collected from parents on family video use, andchildren were observed in their homes as they viewed the cassettes. and M. [2 ]Special Report to CTW on SESAME STREET (New York: A. D. A. 13,251-274. [9]Skelly Yankelovich and Shulman White/Clancy, The Role of SESAMESTREET among Children in Poverty (New York, November, 1989). L. In the mid-seventies, the ETS evaluation data for SESAME STREET werereanalyzed by Cook and others.[7] They also reached positive but moremodest conclusions about the effects of SESAME STREET after removing whatthey considered to be the learning effects not of the series per se, but of"encouragement to view."[8] The natural home environment, however, is notan experimental condition of uniform non-encouragement, but one in whichmany mothers encourage their child to view, view with their child, anddiscuss elements on the show. Such speech is well-suited to introducing word meanings to young viewers. [19]SESAME STREET Research, Statement of Instructional Goals for theTwenty-Second Experimental Season of SESAME STREET (199 -1991) (New York,Children's Television Workshop, 199 ). Recentevidence of SESAME STREET's educational impact has been found by MabelRice, et al., at the Center for Research on the Influences of Television onChildren at the University of Kansas. Measuresincluded the Brigance K & 1 Screening for Kindergarten and First Grade, therecognition of numerals section of the Brigance Diagnostic Inventory ofBasic Skills, and other testing materials designed to assess the skillstaught by the videos. A mother who has spent literally thousands ofhours observing her preschool child across the entire gamut of life'sbehaviors does not need a control group, a statistical comparison, or arandom sample to know when her child has learned something from SESAMESTREET. "Teaching Cooperation on Television: An Evaluation ofSESAME STREET Social Goals Programs." AV Communication Review. A series ofstatistical analyses were run to see how well SESAME STREET viewingpredicted final scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. [13]M. Truglio and J. In Turkey, for example,SESAME STREET is called SUSAM SOKAGI. Princeton: Educational Testing Service, November, 1971.Children's Television Workshop. New York, 199 .Cook, T. (ERIC accessioncodes are ED 47 823 for the final report of the first study, and ED 1228 and ED 122 8 1 for reports on the second-year study. Similar comparisons of other age groups lead us to state that, apart from the effects of maturation, SESAME STREET viewing causes an increase in children's baseline scores which is comparable to about one year in development. C. NielsenCompany, 199 ).----------------------- 1 Ball and G. Ball, The Second Year of SESAME STREET: AContinuing Evaluation, 2 vols. Mothers wereinstructed to report in detail any new behaviors their child displayedwhile viewing. . Goals include helping children learn the alphabet and numbers, new vocabulary words, Spanish words, and the names for geo- metric forms. - Cognitive Organization. Bogatz and S. [7]T. They did not prove to be, as some had expected, bored, restless, or passive parti- cipants in the formal classroom.[5] One component of the second-year study entailed evaluating theeducational effects of the second year's curriculum on children who had notbeen previously exposed to SESAME STREET. Frequent viewers performedbetter than infrequent viewers and also made the greatest gains from pre-test to post-test. Skills given the most timeand attention on the program were the skills learned the best.[4] Notethat the exposure period of a typical SESAME STREET viewer is notrestricted to a 26-week period, as was spanned in the initial ETS study,but probably three years or more, which would make the ETS measures oflearning gains a conservative estimate. Shaffer, G. The results indicated that children learned whenthey viewed the SESAME STREET cassettes, even when the viewing wasinfrequent and spaced over several months. C. But they actually received a post-test score (71.95) which is higher than the mean of the 5:6 year-old [five years, six months] children (65.82). Huston, R. Nielsen Company, 199 .Yankelovich, Skelly and White/Clancy Shulman. the learning effects ofthe cassette viewing are rather remarkable, given that the childrenaveraged only two-and-one-half to three hours of viewing of each tape, over11 weeks, in a situation with competing social activities."[13] Research shows that young children respond verbally to SESAME STREET. Tamkin, S. The OPTIC measures social behavior by placing two children into aseries of carefully designed situations, and scoring the children onwhether they cooperated with each other. For the purposes of the data analysis,the sample was divided at the end of the 26-week broadcast season intoquartiles, according to the children's frequency of viewing SESAMESTREET.[2] Complex statistical analyses were conducted to determinewhether to attribute observed differences to interactions with otherfactors, or to viewing SESAME STREET.[3] The bottom-line finding was that children who watched the mostlearned the most. 3 (199 ): 421-8.Rice, M. Mothers kept extensive logs throughout the study period,noting what the children were watching, whether others were present, andwhether any verbal behavior occurred during viewing. The ERICaccession codes for the first- and second-year summaries are ED 122 799 andED 122 8 2.) [4]S. SESAME STREET in particular elicited verbalresponses ("TV talk," as it is termed in the study) from young children andtheir parents in the viewing situation, and is mentioned frequently inverbatim responses in the report. and G. A. L. Sixteenfamilies volunteered to be participants in this study. As a measure ofcooperation, Paulson used the Oregon Preschool Test of InterpersonalCooperation (OPTIC), a picture recognition test, and observations from freeplay. TV households with a child under six(1 ,32 households with a child under six) plus many other households aswell.[2 ] SESAME STREET costs less than one penny per household viewing. Vol. [12]M. At the beginning ofthe study, the children's ages ranged from six months to two-and-one-halfyears; at the end, from one to three years. and P. 3, (1974): 229-46.Rice, M. The volume of research associated with SESAME STREET--research intoproduction issues, educational effects, theoretical issues--is withoutequal in the entire field of educational television.[1] Even so, associety changes, significant questions continue to arise, and CTW continuesto research them. A. This area aims to promote self-awareness in children, to help them better under- stand themselves in relation to their world, and to gain a sense of mastery over it. Viewing of SESAME STREET was measured by having parents fill outdiaries, recording viewing of all family members for one week in the springand one week in the fall for two years. Research shows that SESAME STREET workseducationally with children in other countries. C. A geographically diverse sample of 943children ranging in age from three to five, 731 of whom were considered tobe from disadvantaged backgrounds, were randomly assigned to one of thefollowing conditions: 1) encouraged-to-view at home, 2) encouraged-to-viewat school, 3) not-encouraged-to-view at home, or 4) not-encouraged-to-viewat school. L. SESAME STREET graduates who were frequent viewers and who entered school during the show's second year were, according to results from teacher ranking quest- ionnaires, better prepared than their non- or low- viewing classmates, and more important, adapted well to the school experience. Sahin, Preliminary Report on the Summative Evaluation of theTurkish Co-Production of SESAME STREET, Presented at the InternationalConference on Adaptations of SESAME STREET, September 4-7, 199 . Shaffer, G. Thechildren in the experimental group were exposed to SESAME STREET for aperiod of six months and were pre- and post-tested in their own homes byexperienced researchers. Children displayed a variety of verbal behaviors in response totelevision. Vol. L. Huston, R. Cook argues that the encouragement alone caused some ofthe learning gains. Rice. Although not scientific in methodology, millions of Americanparents know from first-hand experience that SESAME STREET works: itteaches, it models, it invites participation, it entertains. - Human Diversity. Among the most frequently cited documents in the research literatureon children's television, and the most elaborate studies to date on theeffects of SESAME STREET, are the Educational Testing Service (ETS)evaluations of SESAME STREET's first two seasons. Resultsindicated that viewing SESAME STREET during ages three to three-and-a-halfyears contributed significantly to improved vocabulary scores at age five,and suggested a positive cumulative effect of SESAME STREET viewing duringthe ages from three to five years. SESAME STREET Research: A Twentieth Anniversary Symposium. [17]SESAME STREET co-productions entail a joint effort between CTW andthe education and broadcast communities of foreign countries. They examined the relationshipbetween preschool children's viewing of SESAME STREET and their vocabularydevelopment, finding that children in SESAME STREET's target age range, butnot older children, benefited from watching SESAME STREET in terms ofexpanded vocabulary. Nearly all ofthe children had watched SESAME STREET, and nearly two in three werewatching on a daily/almost daily basis. What a child of 5 knew before SESAME STREET, now seems to be known by a child at the age of 4.[18] Today, SESAME STREET continues as an experiment. The First Year of SESAME STREET: An Evaluation. Theexperimental group of 36 children viewed the entire season of programs; thecontrol group of 42 children did not watch the show. Also,children who viewed were more likely than those who did not view torecognize the examples of cooperation presented on the show, judge thecooperation solution as "best," and use the word "cooperation" in anappropriate manner.[15] Mothers report that SESAME STREET helps prepare their children forschool. One can constantly hear testimonials suchas the young child who sings a song in Spanish when there is no Spanishspoken in the home, or who starts asking questions about topics mentionedon the show, or who generalizes a principle learned from the show ("Mommy--Look! Beyond the evidence of formal research such as experiments andsurveys, there is another powerful source of evidence about the role thatSESAME STREET plays in the lives of young children. Preliminary Report on the Summative Evaluation of the Turkish Co-production of SESAME STREET. 26, No. The Peabody Picture VocabularyTest (PPVT) was administered to the children at the beginning and end ofthe two-year period as a measure of vocabulary gain. . This area aims to engender an aware- ness in children that some people are differnt from them, but all people share commonalities. Goals include matching objects, recognizing embedded figures, understanding part/whole relationships and patterns, identifying sounds, discriminating sound patterns, and providing children with music experiences. A. 3 (1974): 229-46. L. Recent survey data, for example, indicatethat about three-fourths of the mothers in viewing, low-income householdsreport that they do talk about SESAME STREET with their child.[9] CTW hasalways encouraged parents to view actively with their preschool child,because this is known to be a powerful combination. Nail-Sahin, research director of anevaluation of SUSAM SOKAGI, recently presented the preliminary researchresults of a major study of that series' educational impact, conducted with1,166 children, ages three to six.[17] These children were selected fromlow-income neighborhoods of the Ankara area, and were representative of thetarget audience. With CTW asadvisor, co-productions of SESAME STREET are adapted to the language,needs, and cultural mores of the foreign countries. Parents seethe results with their own eyes. Statistically significant gainswere obtained in the following areas: function of body parts, naminggeometric forms, roles of community members, matching by form, namingletters, letter sounds, sight reading, recognizing numbers, naming numbers,counting, relational terms, classification, and sorting.[6] For two yearsin a row, therefore, SESAME STREET showed measurable educational impact. Conner, A. Four SESAME STREET cassettes--"I'mGlad I'm Me," "The Alphabet Game," "Learning About Letters," and "Count ItHigher"--were given to families for natural, instructional use in thisstudy. Executive Summary: Exploration of the Uses and Effectiveness of SESAME STREET Home Video- cassettes. Goals include teach- ing science, reasoning, problem-solving, safety, emo- tions, social units (i.e., family, neighborhood, city, school), social interaction, and the environment. F. . Researchers gathered from all over the worldto compare notes and share evaluative research results on the educationaleffectiveness of adapted versions of SESAME STREET. Last year, 1, mothers of preschool children, drawn from 25cities throughout the United States, all with incomes at the poverty level,were asked about the role of SESAME STREET in their lives. Inaddition, children were tested prior to and following the period of homeviewing on cognitive skills thought to be influenced by watching. [11]M. Children in the "frequent viewers" group (Q4) scored 4 points higher on the post-test of 2 3 items than a comparable group ofchildren who had never watched the show (Q1). . The finding that children who watched more gained moreheld true across age, sex, geographical location, socioeconomic status,mental age, whether the dominant language was English or Spanish, andwhether children watched at home or at school. Princeton: Educational Testing Service, October,197 .Bogatz, G. This area teaches perceptual discrimination and orientation skills in both the visual and auditory domain. Conner, A. Most recently, for example, curriculum seminars have been held on racerelations between Caucasians and African-Americans. "Television As a Talking Picture Book: A Propfor Language Acquisition." Journal of Children's Language. L. There are also special curriculum areas for children with mental retardation, deafness, and special needs. One 18-month-old "identified at least adozen objects during the opening song to SESAME STREET. it [SESAME STREET] . Weber (Eds.). Anyone who has watched SESAME STREETwith a preschooler as he or she eagerly calls out the letters of thealphabet, counts with The Count, or sings a song with Big Bird, knows at aninformal level what the research says formally: SESAME STREET is doing itsjob. [5]G. Statement of Instructional Goals for the Twenty-Second Experimental Season of SESAME STREET (199 -1991). [6]There were some curriculum areas where no gains could be detectedsuch as geometric forms, matching by position, alphabet recitation,enumeration, conservation, and parts of the whole, but there were no areasin which the show had a negative effect. SESAME STREET works internationally; it is not just an Americanphenomenon. Among the testing instruments used were theoriginal Ball and Bogatz ETS battery, the SESAME STREET familiarity test toassess how familiar children were with the main characters, andquestionnaires administered to mothers to find out about family viewingpatterns. These results indicated a total mean gain of 31 points from pre-test to post-test. Reflecting back after the passage of 2 years, Samuel Ball stated thefollowing about the methodology of the original ETS studies: . Leon Paulson, "Teaching Cooperation on Television: AnEvaluation of SESAME STREET Social Goals Programs," AV CommunicationReview, Vol. This is not a single-issue series: thebasic cognitive emphasis which characterized the initial programming isstill there, but it is increasingly shared with contemporary social issues. Lawrence, KS: Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children, 199 ).Sahin, N. Some broader goals include helpingchildren realize that reading and writing are ways to communicate and that they are enjoyable. Motherswere especially pleased with the teaching of letters and numbers, and wereaware of other benefits also (e.g., social skills, self-awareness).Mothers with older children reported that SESAME STREET had helped theirchildren with school work.[16] A "second-generation" effect was revealed:4 percent of the mothers surveyed had themselves watched SESAME STREET aschildren. New York: A. Appleton, R. By contrast, only 22percent rated children's other favorite programs as favorably. . Rice and M. Paulson found that the SESAMESTREET viewers learned to cooperate more than those who did not view, whentested in situations similar to those presented on the program. This is the evidenceof observation--not of dozens or even hundreds of formal researchobservations, but countless first-hand experiences that parents have hadwith their own children. Standing right bythe set she pointed at the objects as they rapidly changed: baby, mouse,baby, and so on."[14] The researchers concluded that effective televisioncan serve to facilitate children's language acquisition. Older viewers, from five to seven yearsof age, showed less vocabulary benefit from viewing this preschool series.It is noteworthy that these positive effects were not evident for otherkinds of children's programs; the vocabulary benefit was specific toviewing SESAME STREET. Sell. Children enjoy SESAME STREET: 75percent of the mothers named SESAME STREET as their child's favorite show.Mothers acclaimed SESAME STREET for its educational benefits; 8 percentgave overall ratings of "excellent" to SESAME STREET. L. Sell, Executive Summary: Exploration of the Usesand Effectiveness of SESAME STREET Home Videocassettes (Lawrence, KS:Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children, 199 ). Researchers visited thefamilies in their homes to observe the children being exposed totelevision. New York: Children's Television Workshop, June, 199 .SESAME STREET Research. 22, No. A substantial sample, particularly for a longitudinalstudy, of 326 children and their families in Topeka, Kansas were theparticipants in this study. The Role of SESAME STREET Among Children in Poverty. . and S. This area covers pre-reading, pre-writing, and pre-mathematics goals. Rice, A. His sample of 78 children includedthree- and four-year-olds from disadvantaged, inner-city backgrounds. The goals for the 22ndexperimental season of SESAME STREET--over 6 goals in total--are groupedinto four broad categories:[19] - Children and Their World. Wright, "Words fromSESAME STREET: Learning Vocabulary While Viewing," DevelopmentalPsychology, Vol. A longitudinal study, whose purpose was to collect observations of youngchildren's television viewing behavior in their own homes, was conducted byDafne Lemish and Mabel Rice over a period of six to eight months. Relational concepts and classification skills are also stressed.Some other goals for the 22nd season address contemporary topics such ashelping children gain useful knowledge about and positive attitudes towardcomputers. we remain committed to our heavily quantitative, scientific, methodology-oriented approach, and we hope (and we know) that later researchers looked for more subtle nuances . [14]D. Appleton, R. This paper sets out some of the highlights on what is known now,based on research about the educational effectiveness of SESAME STREET. New York: Children's Television Workshop, 199 .Special Report to CTW on SESAME STREET. In various adaptations, SESAME STREET plays in over 8 countriesaround the globe, addressing educational goals tailored to children inthose cultural settings. All children were pre- and post-tested on an extensive, ETS-constructed testing instrument designed to measure performance in thefollowing skill areas: knowledge of the alphabet and numbers, names ofbody parts, recognition of forms, knowledge of relational terms, andsorting and classification skills. The Second Year of SESAME STREET: A Continuing Evaluation, 2 vols. The first-season ETSstudy investigated SESAME STREET's impact on the development of specificcognitive skills, with particular attention to the moderating effects ofage, sex, prior achievement level, home background conditions (includingSpanish spoken at home), and the measurable benefits of viewing the seriesat home and in preschool classes. The researchers emphasized that children are in a stage of rapidvocabulary acquisition between the ages of one-and-one-half to six years ofage, learning an average of nine new words a day. C. L. Gains were noted in children'svocabulary, letter recognition, number recognition, and printed wordidentification. The children were assigned to either an experimental(exposed to SUSAM SOKAGI) or a control group (not exposed). . In their view, thepositive effects of SESAME STREET viewing on children's vocabularydevelopment resulted from a combination of the content and presentationformats found in SESAME STREET, its appeal, and preschoolers' readiness tolearn new vocabulary. Those interested inpursuing its finer methodological points are referred to the first- andsecond-year reports and summaries available via ERIC.
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