In 1969, the children's television show Sesame Street premiered on the National Educational Television network (later succeeded by PBS) in the United States. Unlike earlier children's programming, the show's producers used research and over 1,000 studies and experiments to create the show and test its impact on its young viewers' learning. 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 that combined the expertise of researchers and early childhood educators with that of the program's writers, producers, and directors.
CTW conducted research in two ways: in-house formative research that 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 to measure young viewers' attention to the program. Based on these findings, the researchers compiled a body of data and the producers changed the show accordingly.
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. Subsequent studies have replicated these findings, such as the effect of the show in countries outside of the U.S., several longitudinal studies, the effects of war and natural disasters on young children, and studies about how the show affected viewers' cognition. CTW researcher Gerald S. Lesser stated in 1974 that 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".Lesser, p. 214
Background and development According to author Louise A. Gikow, Sesame Street's use of research to create individual episodes and to test its effect on its young viewers set it apart from other children's programsGikow, p. 152 Co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney called the idea of combining research with television production "positively heretical" because it had never been done before.Cooney in Fisch & Truglio, p. xi 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"Palmer & Fisch in Fisch & Truglio, p. 6 and were often condescending to their audience. Scriptwriters of these shows had no training in education or child development.Palmer & Fisch in Fisch & Truglio, p. 7
The Carnegie Corporation, one of Sesame Street's first financial backers, hired Cooney, a producer of educational talk shows and documentaries with little experience in education, during the summer of 1967 to visit experts in child development, education, and media across the U.S. and Canada. She researched their ideas about the viewing habits of young children, and wrote a report on her findingsDavis, p. 65Morrow, p. 47 entitled "Television for Preschool Education", which described how television could be used as an aid in the education of preschoolers, especially those living in inner citiesLesser & Schneider in Fisch & Truglio, pp. 26–27 and became the basis for Sesame Street. Full funding was procured for the production of the new show, and for the creation of the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the organization responsible for producing it. The show's financial backers, which consisted of the U.S. federal government, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation,Davis, p. 8 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 CityLesser, p. 43 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 used a curriculum, which Palmer, who was responsible for conducting the show's formative research, and Fisch described as "detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes".Palmer & Fisch in Fisch & Truglio, p. 9 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.Morrow, p. 74 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,Borgenicht, p. 9 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".
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. As of 2001, ten seminars had been conducted specifically to address the literacy needs of preschool children.Fisch & Schneider in Fisch & Truglio, p. 34Truglio et al. in Fisch & Truglio, p. 66 Curriculum seminars prior to Sesame Street's 33rd season in 2002 resulted in a change from the show's magazine-like format to a more narrative format. There have been over 1,000 studies as of 2001 which examine the show's impact on children's learning and attention, although most of these studies were conducted by the CTW and remain unpublished.Truglio & Fisch in Fisch & Truglio, p. xvii Educator Herbert A. Sprigle and psychologist Thomas D. Cook conducted two studies during the show's first two seasons that found that the show increased the educational gap between poor and middle-class children, although these studies had little impact on the public discussion about Sesame Street.Morrow, pp. 146–147 Another criticism of the show was made by journalist Kay Hymowitz in 1995, who reported that most of the positive research conducted on the show has been done by the CTW, and then sent to a sympathetic press. She charged that the studies conducted by the CTW "hint at advocacy masquerading as social science".
The "CTW model" 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.Morrow, p. 68 The CTW model involved the interaction between television producers and educators, the development of a curriculum for 1972 to 1974 children, formative research to shape the program, and independent summative research into what viewers learned. According to Cooney, "Without research, there would be no Sesame Street." 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.Cooney in Fisch & Truglio, p. xii Cooney stated, about 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 create a non-adversarial relationship between producers and researchers; each side contributed, as Fisch stated, "its own unique perspective and expertise".Fisch & Bernstein in Fisch & Truglio, pp. 52–53 Early in the planning process, production staff recognized that it was valuable to have access to researchers who could analyze children's reactions and help them improve production, and the show's writers and producers brought their instincts for and experience in children's television. Though initially skeptical about both the collaboration and the curriculum, the writers eventually came to see both as integral parts of the creative process.Gikow, p. 157
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 assessed through research and interviews with television producers, researchers, and educational experts, similar to the process followed in the U.S. The producers then convened a series of meetings with the experts, held in the individual countries, to create and develop a curriculum, the program's educational goals, its set, and its characters.Gikow, p. 260 They held meetings, at the CTW offices in New York City and in the respective country, to train the co-production team in the CTW model.Gikow, p. 262 Each co-production conducted formative studies before production and if possible, summative studies to test the efficacy of its curriculum.
Formative research
Methods Palmer and his team used concepts from the field of formative research, which consisted of in-house, laboratory-oriented research, to guide production and to determine whether the show held children's attention.Fisch & Bernstein in Fisch & Truglio, p. 40 Palmer, described by Cooney as "a founder of CTW and founder of its research function",Palmer & Fisch in Fisch & Truglio, p. 4 was one of the few late-1960s academics studying children's television and its effects on learning.Gladwell, p. 102 He was responsible for designing and executing CTW's formative research, and for working with ETS, which handled the Workshop's summative research. Palmer's work was so crucial to Sesame Street that author 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.Fisch & Bernstein in Fisch & Truglio, pp. 48–49Morrow, p. 81 Palmer developed "the distractor",Palmer & Fisch in Fisch & Truglio, p. 15 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.Palmer & Fisch in Fisch & Truglio, p. 14Gladwell, pp. 102–103 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. However, if it only worked 50 percent of the time they would change (or remove) content.Gladwell, p. 103 In research conducted during later seasons of Sesame Street, verbal measurements, in the form of letter-recognition tests, were introduced. These reinforced earlier results, providing more insight into children's knowledge, reactions, and responses than behavioral measures alone. The distractor method was modified by 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, such as 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 Fisch as "state-of-the-art research design".Gikow, p. 160 One innovation included the "engagement measure", which recorded children's active responses to an episode, such as laughing or dancing to music.
Results