G Is for Growing

Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street

Shalom M. Fisch, Rosemarie T. Truglio, Shalom M. Fisch, Rosemarie T. Truglio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135664947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume--a collection and synthesis of key research studies since the program's inception over three decades ago--serves as a marker of the significant role that Sesame Street plays in the education and socialization of young children. Editors Shalom M. Fisch and Rosemarie T. Truglio have included contributions from both academics and researchers directly associated with Sesame Street, creating a resource that describes the processes by which educational content and research are integrated into production, reviews major studies on the impact of Sesame Street on children, and examines the extension of Sesame Street into other cultures and media. In the course of this discussion, the volume also explores broader topics, including methodological issues in conducting media-based research with young children, the longitudinal impact of preschoolers' viewing of educational versus non-educational television, and crosscultural differences in the treatment of educational content. As the first substantive book on Sesame Street research in more than two decades, "G" is for Growing provides insight into the research process that has informed the development of the program and offers valuable guidelines for the integration of research into future educational endeavors. Intended for readers in media studies, children and the media, developmental studies, and education, this work is an exceptional chronicle of the growth and processes behind what is arguably the most influential program in children's educational television.

I	Integrating Research and Educational Content Into Production

1	The Beginnings of Sesame Street Research*

Edward L. Palmer

World Media Partners
with

Shalom M. Fisch

Children’s Television Workshop

The Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) was established in March 1968, with Joan Ganz Cooney as Director. Cooney had worked under the umbrella of the Carnegie Corporation and in collaboration with its vice president, Lloyd Morrisett, to craft the original Sesame Street proposal, generate essential grant support, plan, and launch CTW. With major grant funding in hand, and a nascent organization that existed mainly on paper, Cooney launched immediately into conducting five Sesame Street curriculum planning seminars (under the able leadership of Harvard University professor Gerald S. Lesser) and recruiting the key members of the CTW professional staff. The proposed television series, according to the organizational plan, was to be created through a collaboration among two independently headed, in-house departments—one consisting of experts in television production, and the other of experts in empirical research, child development, and learning—and a cadre of outside curriculum advisors. The first author of this chapter joined the CTW staff, after some prior participation in curriculum planning, in July 1968 as the Workshop’s first Director of Research (and subsequently as a corporate officer and Vice President for Research), and in this capacity became, as Joan Cooney in later years often introduced him, “a founder of CTW and founder of its research function.”

Backed by an extraordinarily generous $8 million in grant funds for a 2-year project, CTW’s sole initial mandate was to create, broadcast, promote, and evaluate an experimental educational television series of 130 hour-long programs that would seek to advance the school readiness of 3- to 5-year-old children, with special emphasis on the needs of youngsters from low-income and minority backgrounds.

All who contributed in key roles to the creation of Sesame Street shared an appreciation for its timeliness, speaking of it often and unabashedly as “the right idea at the right time.” Clearly, the series’ educational focus and rationale were directly rooted in the broad social-political forces and specific educational priorities of the era. This timeliness, combined with Sesame Street’s lavish scale of initial funding support and high national visibility, generated a heady but sobering sense among the staff that we were privileged participants in an activity of some moment. First, we knew that we held in our hands a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to contribute significantly to an urgent and otherwise unmet, national educational need—that, in specific and palpably human terms, we might measurably enhance the life chances of millions of educationally deprived youngsters. Second, we knew that a nationally broadcast television series that featured popular television forms would be highly visible. Third, we knew that we had the luxury of working under close-to-ideal conditions: nearly 18 months for planning, experimental production, and child testing of program approaches before putting the television series on the air; the resources to enlist not only the most expensive of television’s popular entertainment forms, but also the services of a major promotional and public relations firm; and the involvement of a nationally prominent, third-party evaluator to assess the series’ educational effectiveness. Our extent of success or failure, we knew, would figure prominently in shaping educational television policies and practices for many years to come.

BACKGROUND OF HISTORICAL EVENTS AND EDUCATIONAL POLICIES

The historical events and educational policies of the late 1960s that shaped Sesame Street’s educational goals and audience priorities also directly framed the activities and policy positions of the in-house research team. One major historical force of the time was the Civil Rights movement; among its many accomplishments, the movement focused unprecedented national attention on the crucial role education would have to play if children from low-income circumstances, including disproportionately large numbers of minority-group members, were to escape the cycle of poverty. Head Start and Sesame Street were two outgrowths of broad education policies that recognized that special efforts to stimulate the educational progress of children from low-income backgrounds should include an emphasis on school-readiness skills starting at a very early (preschool) age. A research study of the era, published by Benjamin Bloom (1964) at the University of Chicago and quoted in the original Sesame Street proposal, had concluded that more than one half of a child’s lifetime intellectual capacity is formed by 5 years of age. A spate of studies, such as those published by Carl Bereiter (Bereiter & Engelman, 1966) and Martin Deutch (1965), found that low-income, minority children, on arriving at first grade, not only tested substantially lower on average that their white, middle-class counterparts in school-related skills, but also, over the course of their early school years, logged a cumulative education deficit. Head Start therefore set out to provide not only early but also “compensatory” education (i.e., education geared preferentially to children of poverty).

Sesame Street operated outside this compensatory model, because of its ubiquity as a television program. Already, at the time of the series’ premiere in 1968, 97% of all U.S. households possessed a television set (A. C. Nielsen Company, 1967), thus making the series equally accessible to children of all socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Some confusion occurred due to a statement in the initial Sesame Street proposal that suggested that the television series might help to narrow the academic achievement gap between the middle-class children and those from low-income, minority backgrounds—a goal consistent with a compensatory education model, but that I considered unrealistic for the reason mentioned previously. Instead, CTW adopted an alternative policy that eliminated this unrealistic goal from all subsequent Sesame Street funding proposals, starting with the second-season funding proposal written in early 1970, and from CTW publicity releases. I also encouraged the company that conducted the third-party evaluations of Sesame Street during its first two broadcast seasons, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), to forego conducting analysis that focused on the narrowing of the achievement gap. ETS elected not to comply, which was its prerogative as independent evaluator. One team of academic researchers published a book-length report much later arguing that Sesame Street should be held accountable to bring about compensatory, “narrow the gap” results (Cook et al., 1975). CTW’s policy position on the subject, forged early in the 1970s, was expressed many times in CTW policy pronouncements to the effect that there is a basic level of literacy whose achievement opens up greatly expanded opportunities for employment and many other privileges. While Sesame Street could not determine which group of children would cross that line first, it could—and did—aim to ensure that the maximum number possible would do so.

A second historical factor, closely associated with the first, was President Lyndon Johnson’s push to create the Great Society. His policies, along with his widely noted powers of persuasion over Congress, gave rise to high levels of government leadership and funding involvement in education.

Still a third historical phenomenon was the rapid growth of public broadcasting. The Ford Foundation alone channeled $300 million into public broadcasting over the 20-year period that ended in 1971. One propitious result of this investment, viewed from the CTW perspective, was the creation of the first nationwide public television network in 1969, just in time for Sesame Street’s premiere broadcast. This network harnessed the combined signal capacity of the (then) 300 independent public television stations, and so afforded public television a signal coverage area that reached an estimated 65% to 70% of all U.S. television households. This coverage would soon grow to exceed 95%. To CTW, at the time of Sesame Street’s inauguration in 1969, the ability to reach two thirds of the country’s 12 million 3- to 5-year-olds meant that a given episode of the series potentially could be seen by as many as 8 million members of the intended viewing-learning audience. To funders of public television programs, nationwide networking afforded them desired access to large national audiences, and, in the process, allowed them to achieve highly favorable cost-effectiveness by driving down the cost per viewer reached.

In 1969, the service we now call public television included 130 local stations with a combined signal coverage that reached about two thirds of all U.S. households, mostly on hard-to-tune UHF channels. One might have thought that the “big eight”—the largest and strongest of public television’s urban production centers—somehow would have divided the turf, with one or two specializing in the news, another one or two specializing in culture and the arts, and somewhere along the line, one taking the lead in the field of children’s programming, but this is not the way the system shook out. No large station chose to be the preeminent supplier of quality children’s programs to the entire system.

BACKGROUND OF CHILDREN’S AND EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION

Prior to Sesame Street and public television networking, many public television stations carried their own locally produced children’s programs. More often than not, these programs represented the vision and agenda, as well as the script and studio direction, of a single individual. True to the insight of then-popular media guru, Marshall McLuhan, the children’s television pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s simply imitated prior media forms. Many, for example, created “storybook television,” filled with shots of book covers and static, illustrated pages. Others created a type of “proscenium television,” in which child viewers were treated to a camera’s-eye view of a classroom, railroad station, or other fantasy location filled with children. The hosts of these programs were often insufferably condescending. In a fictitious but fairly typical example, a local host might try to enhance the illusion of audience participation by looking directly into camera and pretending to be able to see and interact with the viewing children: “Oh, my, aren’t we all having just so much fun here today! Are you having fun, too? Miss Patty is so happy to see that all of you out there in television land are having fun today!” Sesame Street was a sharp contrast, with its educational mandate and accountability, its dedication to exploring what might be accomplished in education through the unique language of television, its hip, popular style, and its frequent “winks” to the adult viewers. Sesame Street was not the first children’s television series in the United States to combine education and entertainment. The Captain Kangaroo series, for example, which had been a staple of American children’s television since 1955, touched on many educational themes, and couched these in popular entertainment forms. What distinguished Sesame Street (and, to a lesser degree, the contemporaneous Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) was the combination of narrowly focused and expertly planned educational curriculum, its attempt to forge the most effective possible methods of televised teaching, and its accountability to bring about rigorously measured educational results. Captain Kangaroo, for all its merits, offered “education” only in the broadest sense of the term: lessons invented by scriptwriters who possessed no training in education or child development, made no use of expert consultants or advisors, and answered to no education stakeholders.

THE ORIGINS AND SCOPE OF SESAME STREET RESEARCH

The story of Sesame Street research must begin with an understanding of the conditions at the time. Without the proper conditions, CTW could not have been established as the world’s first, largest, and most enduring center for children’s out-of-school educational programs, nor could its work have been grounded so firmly in curriculum, formative research, and accountability for bringing about measured learning results. In the 1980s, a comparative study of children’s television organizations in the United States and selected industrial countries identified factors in their respective histories and incentive structures that caused them to serve children either better or less well. The study found that Britain and Japan both supported their public broadcasting organizations by levying television and radio taxes adequate to support comprehensive program offerings (i.e., program offerings that strived to provide equitable amount of schedule time and level of program quality to every major audience category, including children). By contrast, funding for U.S. public television was woefully inadequate to support a similarly comprehensive program offering (Palmer, 1988).

The existence of great program gaps in the U.S. public television schedule in turn opened the way for enterprising, independent organizations to step in and establish themselves as program suppliers. It was this circumstance that allowed CTW to become a major supplier of children’s out-of-school educational television programs. The Workshop’s educational programming purview soon expanded to include a new kind of hybrid, home-and-school television series (as exemplified by The Electric Company, a reading series for children of early elementary school age; 3-2-1 Contact, a science series for 8- to 12-year-olds; Square One Television, a series about mathematics for 8- to 12-year-olds; and Ghostwriter, a writing and reading series also geared to elementary school-age children), along with several adult educational series. The emphasis on curriculum, formative research and outcome evaluation in connection with its programs is the direct result of CTW’s need to seek funding for these programs on an ad hoc basis, series by series and year by year. Clearly, the grant-giving organizations that funded Sesame Street and these additional educational television series would not have invested as they did to support the creation of programs that were only broadly educational. What they were attracted to, instead, was the opportunity to invest in a succession of large-scale educational television productions, each addressed to a national education need or deficiency that was major, clearly recognized, and otherwise unmet. In this manner, Sesame Street responded to the need for early childhood education, The Electric Company to a poor national “report card” on reading, and 3-2-1 Contact to studies showing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I: INTEGRATING RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL CONTENT INTO PRODUCTION
• PART II: IMPACT OF SESAME STREET
• PART III: EXTENDING SESAME STREET: OTHER SETTINGS, OTHER MEDIA
• PART IV: CONCLUSION
• Afterword
• About the Authors
• Author Index
• Subject Index