Sesame Street

Children spend an extraordinary amount of time with media, and media are perhaps one of the most important sources of informal learning during the course of a child’s day. Few media programs are as enduring as Sesame Street, an educational media program focusing on learning and development in preschool-age children. When the show was created in 1969, its founder Joan Ganz Cooney saw the potential of television as an educational tool that could provide informal learning opportunities to help children—especially those from lower income families—get ready for school. Together with a team of producers, educators, and researchers, Sesame Street pioneered the model for educational television production that involved critical review and testing of the content during the production process. This entry discusses the development of ...