IN THE LATE 1960S, THE CHILDREN’S TELEVISION WORKSHOP (CTW) designed the first children’s television program to address specific educational goals, Sesame Street. In an unprecedented partnership, television producers collaborated with formative researchers to create instructionally effective television based on the results of empirical investigation.

CTW staff engaged in a cycle of planning, filming rough cuts, pilot testing with target audiences, and revising footage based on research results. This article reviews three of the major findings of the CTW researchers.

CTW researchers knew that they must catch and hold children’s attention in order to teach them. Unlike a classroom setting, there was no teacher in the television environment to direct attention once it had wandered. One production technique found particularly effective in catching attention was animation. 

Researchers found children paid more attention to animated images than to still images of the letter J.

During pilot testing, children viewed two sequences about the letter J, one with J as a static image and one with J as an animated image. During the viewings, researchers employed the distractor technique to measure attention (Palmer and Fisch, 2000).

Audivisual stimuli (in the form of kaleidoscopic images projected onto a screen) played simultaneously with the J sequences. Every 7.5 seconds, researchers would note whether children were looking at or away from the television screen. The results indicated children attended better while viewing the animated J piece than when viewing the static J piece.

One of Sesame Street’s educational goals was for viewers to learn the letters of the alphabet. Researchers pretested children on their ability to recognize and label individual letters and then had pilot test groups view content on that letter under different conditions. Not surprisingly, children improved in their ability to recognize and label letters after repeated viewings of the content (Lesser, 1974).

However, CTW researchers discovered a more complicated relationship between repetition and learning. Learning increased when repetition took place in three distinct ways: when the same segment was viewed repeatedly over a number of episodes, when the content was repeated within one episode but in a different format, and when the same format was used repeatedly to teach different content. Click on the yellow buttons below to view examples of these three types of repetition. 

Critics in the 1960s predicted Sesame Street was doomed to fail because television was not an interactive enough media to facilitate learning. CTW researchers proved them wrong with what is now known as "The James Earl Jones Effect" (Lesser, 1974). 

The James Earl Jones Effect showed
television could provide the interactivity that
children needed to learn. Note the wait time
given before the letter A appears, and
between the time the letter A appears and
the time the letter name is spoken.

Producers filmed a segment in which stage and screen actor James Earl Jones recited the alphabet. Mr. Jones stared intensely at the camera. Moments later, the letter A appeared above his head. In his compelling voice, he then spoke the name of the letter. This sequence of events repeated throughout his one and a half minute recitation, maintaining wait times before the letter appeared on screen and before the letter’s name was spoken.

When researchers showed this segment to children over time, they noted the following: During the initial viewing, children joined Mr. Jones in naming the letters. During subsequent viewings, the children anticipated Mr. Jones’ spoken words and named the letter as soon as it appeared on screen. Finally, children were able to name the letter before it even appeared on screen. Clearly, children were interacting and learning!

Kristin Gibson
San Diego State Graduate Student