Television, Educational and Prosocial Effects of

Educational Effects

Empirical research on children's learning from educational television began in the early 1970s, with Ball and Bogatz's (e.g., 1970) studies on the impact of Sesame Street. These studies found that, over a period of several months, those preschool children who watched Sesame Street most frequently demonstrated the greatest pretest-posttest gains in a wide variety of cognitive tasks (e.g., letter recognition, identification of simple geometric shapes). Moreover, when a subset of the children subsequently entered school, Sesame Street viewers were rated by their teachers as significantly higher in school readiness.

These findings were challenged by critics of Sesame Street, who argued that the effects reflected not simply the impact of Sesame Street but rather a combination of viewing and parental involvement in the viewing experience. When Thomas Cook and his colleagues (1975) reanalyzed the Ball and Bogatz data, controlling for other potentially contributing factors such as mothers' discussing Sesame Street with their children, the Educational Testing Service (ETS; Ball & Bogatz, 1970) effects were reduced, but many remained statistically significant. Thus, while parental involvement appeared to play a role, it could not explain the data completely; rather, Sesame Street itself made a significant contribution.

Decades later, several tightly controlled studies confirmed and extended the evidence for the educational power of Sesame Street. Long-term effects of Sesame Street on children's literacy were found both in a 3-year longitudinal study by John Wright, Aletha Huston, and their colleagues (Wright, Huston, Scantlin, & Kotler, 2001) and in an analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education's National Household Education Survey (Zill, 2001). Together, these studies found that Sesame Street viewing was associated with significant gains in children's reading ability and the time they spent reading; Sesame Street viewers were also significantly less likely to require remedial reading instruction after they entered school. Taking an even longer term perspective, a longitudinal study by Daniel Anderson, Aletha Huston, John [Page 1081]Wright, and their colleagues found that preschool viewing of Sesame Street was associated with significantly better performance in high school (Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger, & Wright, 2001).

In the time since the original research on Sesame Street, many studies have shown that educational television programs produce learning among both preschool and school-aged children. Significant effects have been found on children's knowledge, skills, and attitudes in subject areas such as mathematics, science, and literacy, among others. For example, immediate effects on school readiness have also been observed for television series such as Barney & Friends and Blue's Clues. Viewing the mathematics series Square One TV was found to result in significant improvement in school-aged children's problem-solving skills and attitudes toward mathematics. Significant increases in children's knowledge of science content have been produced by series such as 3–2–1 Contact and Magic School Bus. Many other examples exist as well (see Fisch, 2004, for a review).

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