Educational goals of Sesame Street
The children's television show Sesame Street, which premiered on public broadcasting television stations in 1969, was the first show of its kind that utilized a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, with specific educational goals, in its content. Its goals were garnered from in-house formative research and independent summative evaluations, and its first curriculum was created in a series of five seminars in 1968.
Sesame Street has both cognitive and affective goals. Initially, its producers and researchers focused on their young viewers' cognitive skills, while addressing their affective skills indirectly, because they believed that focusing on cognitive skills would increase children's self-esteem and feelings of competency. They sought to prepare young children for school, especially children from low-income families. The show's producers used modeling, repetition, and humor to fulfill their goals. They made changes in the show's content to increase their viewers' attention and to increase its appeal. They encouraged "co-viewing" to entice older children and parents to watch the show by including humor, cultural references, and celebrities.
After Sesame Street's first season, its producers and researchers began to address affective goals more overtly. They addressed social competence, tolerance of diversity, and nonaggressive ways of resolving conflict, which was depicted through interpersonal disputes among its residents. In the 1980s, the show used the real-life experiences of the show's cast and crew, such as the death of Will Lee and the pregnancy of Sonia Manzano to address affective concerns. In later seasons, Sesame Street addressed real-life disasters such as the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina.
The show's goals for outreach were addressed during its first season by an extensive and innovative promotional campaign targeted at children and their families in low-income, inner city homes because these groups tended to not watch educational programs on television and because traditional methods of promotion and advertising were not effective with them. In subsequent seasons, the producers developed a series of educational materials used in preschool settings.
Purpose
According to author Malcolm Gladwell, "Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them". Gerald S. Lesser, the first chair of the advisory board of the Children's Television Workshop, the organization that oversaw the show's production, stated that to be effective as an educational tool, television needed to capture, focus, and sustain children's attention. Sesame Street was the first children's show that paid attention to the structure of each episode and made "small but critical adjustments" to each segment to capture children's attention.Sesame Street was one of the few children's television programs that utilized a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, with specific educational goals, in its content. The show's goals were garnered from in-house formative research which informed and improved production, and independent summative evaluations conducted by the Educational Testing Service during the show's first two seasons that measured the program's educational effectiveness. The first curriculum was created in a series of five seminars, led by Lesser and attended by Sesame Street's new creative staff and by educational and child development specialists, in 1968. The participants generated long lists of goals, which the Workshop organized into five categories. Eventually, these categories were whittled down to four: symbolic representation, cognitive processes, the physical environment, and the social environment. The show's curriculum was eventually restated to identify the writers' goals instead of the child's.
Cognitive goals
Lesser reported in his 1974 book, Children and Television: Lessons Learned From Sesame Street, written to document the development of the show and the CTW, that one of the goals of the show's creators was "the fundamental purpose of preparing children for school". They were aware of the "individual suffering and frustration" of the child who was ill-prepared for the demands of school, so they sought to instill in their young viewers an appetite for learning. Two related goals were providing their viewers with basic educational skills, which Lesser insisted was valuable to inner-city parents, and teaching children both what and how to think. The show's creators decided to only include in their curriculum the range of skills of the three to five-year-old child, and not focus on skills they already had, or on skills beyond their reach.Sesame Street's creators recognized that television lent itself well to the use of modelling as a teaching tool. They understood that children tended to imitate what they saw on the screen, so many writing and production methods were used to directly model effective verbal communication. Indirect modeling, without explicit labeling, was used to demonstrate positive behaviors as well. One of the positive behaviors they modeled was inquisitiveness and the enjoyment of learning. If humor, for example, interfered with the intended instructional message or exhibited inappropriate behavior, it was removed. As Muppet performer Fran Brill explained, the show's puppeteers demonstrated emotions by banging their puppets' heads against the wall or by having them fall backwards, but when research found that these behaviors did not demonstrate good models of appropriate behavior, these behaviors were changed. The Muppet Roosevelt Franklin, for example, was removed from the show because many leaders in the African American community felt that he displayed negative cultural stereotypes.
The creators of Sesame Street believed that young children were easily distracted by peripheral details and were unable to selectively attend to the most useful aspects of what they observed, so they gave special care to, as Lesser put it, "make salient what the child is expected to learn". They eliminated irrelevant and distracting content without making the content uninteresting, especially in repeated viewings. The content they presented had to compete with the distractions that occurred as a result of viewing at home, so they realized that the show had to have high appeal. They found, however, that the relationship between appeal and comprehension was more complicated than they initially thought, and discovered that young children probably did not attend to material that was presented at a higher level than they were ready to understand. The Workshop's researchers found that by crafting the show's segments, children's verbal participation and interaction could be increased, which addressed their critics' concerns about children's passivity while watching television.
Repetition was a convention used often on Sesame Street. The creators understood that repetition gave young children opportunities to practice new skills and assisted them in making a connection between new and unfamiliar concepts. They observed that children seemed to enjoy some material more after viewing them several times, and allowed them to predict and anticipate the outcome of a sequence. Repetition made it easier to teach complex concepts or situations a child would not be able to comprehend from a single viewing, and allowed children to explore different facets of a subject. In the early years of Sesame Street, the producers took advantage of repetition as an effective teaching tool by often repeating the same segment many times during the course of an episode; in the first ten seasons, one in six segments was a repeat of an earlier one. The Workshop also learned that varying the details while repeating the same format was also an effective use of repetition.
Television historian Robert W. Morrow saw what he called "the often repeated alphabet recitation segment" as an example of the show's use of repetition. For example, in a short film in which actor James Earl Jones recited the alphabet, Jones made long pauses before each letter, which were superimposed in a corner of the screen moments before he said it. According to Cooney, some educational advisors recommended against using Jones, thinking that he would frighten young viewers, but children ended up loving his segments. The producers found that children who had seen the segment a few times said the letter before Jones did, and Jones often served as confirmation or correction. The producers viewed this as a way to make television more interactive, and dubbed it "the James Earl Jones effect".
Humor was used on Sesame Street to both attract the attention of its young viewers and to, as Lesser put it, "entice parents and older siblings to share the young child's viewing", called "coviewing" by Truglio and Fisch. Jim Henson's characters and humor were instrumental in creating the show's "two-tiered audience" of younger and older viewers. Lesser went so far as to state that educational television was "completely dependent upon the effective use of humor". Lesser also stated that in order for comedy to be an effective teaching tool, it had to coincide with the lesson being taught. Although critics complained that slapstick was too violent for children's television, the Workshop found that it was the most effective comedy form they used, and as Lesser said, "a favorite with preschoolers". Morrow reported that the only violence depicted on Sesame Street was "slapstick punctuation", and that it was used only in animations and short films.
Another way the Workshop encouraged co-viewing was through the use of cultural references that only adults would understand. Celebrities familiar to adults and older children also appeared on the show. Cooney's previous documentary production experience and producer Dave Connell's "wide ranging contacts in the media" resulted in successful bookings of celebrities on the show, even before the show became successful. As of 2009, over 500 celebrities had appeared on Sesame Street.