Study: Watching Sesame Street can make kids smarter

Watching Sesame Street may actually help children do better in school. That’s according to a new working paper released by two economists from Wellesley College and the University of Maryland, which seems to suggest that watching Sesame Street can improve school readiness and school performance for years to come.

Researchers Phillip B. Levine and Melissa Kearney looked specifically at the early years of the show’s run. By comparing TV reception quality (based on distance from broadcast towers) to factors such as the local children’s “grade per age,” the researchers argue that children with access to higher-quality Sesame Street broadcasts had a higher likelihood of being on track throughout school. The effect of the higher-quality broadcasts was most pronounced in the case of boys, African-American students, and the economically disadvantaged.

The children’s program has long attracted educational researchers. According to the show’s website, more than 1,000 studies have been performed since the show’s inception in 1969, showing the improvements Sesame Street makes to children’s development. A 1999 study found essentially the same results as Levine and Kearney just published: Sesame Street has profound impacts on students’ academic ability, and the effects of the show can be seen even 10 or 15 years down the line.

It’s no accident that Sesame Street has proven to be so educational. Series founder Joan Ganz Cooney specifically set out to design a program that would engage and educate underprivileged preschoolers. After receiving a grant from the Carnegie Corporation for her project, Cooney drew upon the expertise of professional educators and psychologists in designing the show. One of her team members was Gerald Lesser, a Harvard psychologist. Lesser himself had based his professional career on studying the mental and psychological effects of students’ ethnic and economic circumstances. In his landmark book Mental Abilities of Children From Different Social-Class and Cultural Groups, Lesser determined that socioeconomic class had profound effects on students’ academic performance.

Throughout its long history (the show turned 46 this year), Sesame Street has been proven to affect kids in the following ways:

Early on in the show’s run, researchers were already interested in the educational potential of Sesame Street. A few years after the show’s debut, Judith Haber Minton, a researcher at Marymount Manhattan College, decided to see whether Sesame Street was living up to its goal of preparing kids for kindergarten. Her study used the preexisting Metropolitan Readiness Test to evaluate student performance on a variety of metrics including letter recognition, reading comprehension, and quantitative reasoning. Taking into account differences in socioeconomic class, the study found that Sesame Street managed to improve the performance of students on the “alphabet,” or letter-recognition section, of the MRT.

Sesame Street has also had huge success teaching English as a second language to non-American school children. Back in the late 1980s, Rita Marika Csapó-Sweet — currently a professor of media studies at the University of Missouri St. Louis — conducted a study of Hungarian school-age students. Csapó-Sweet found that children managed to learn significantly more English vocabulary by watching the Sesame Street, compared with peers who were not exposed to the show.

More recent studies have confirmed that the linguistic benefits of Sesame Street are not confined to English, but also work at teaching a variety of local languages. Four-year-olds from Bangladesh who watched the local version of Sesame Street did 67 percent better on literacy tests than children who had no exposure to the show. Similarly, children who watched the Hindi version of Sesame Street in India were able to improve their literacy levels significantly.

In addition to teaching academic skills, Sesame Street aimed to be holistically educational — teaching children not only about math and language, but about social etiquette. Characters like Oscar the Grouch worked to educate kids about differences in perspective and the importance of respecting others’ opinions.

A 1976 study by Brian Coates, H. Ellison Pusser, and Irene Goodman found that young children who watched shows like Sesame Street or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood increased their socializing behaviors. This was especially true for children who researchers found were anti-social at the beginning of the experiment; children who already socialized well before the study saw minimal increases. On the other hand, students who watched more violent shows, such as Batman, were more prone to act out and disobey nursery school rules.

One of the biggest coups of Sesame Street was modeling the show after regular old commercial television, rather than dry educational programs that simply emulated the existing classroom model. In particular, Gerald Lesser found that variety has the greatest impact on children’s interest levels. This knowledge allowed the production team to design programming that was dynamic in a variety of ways, including:

Lesser and his researchers conducted their experiments using a “distractor” — a small screen with flashing slides set up by the TV. The idea was that the screen would provide visual stimulation, and children would look toward it when a particular television segment lost their attention. Show segments that couldn’t hold the children’s attention were scrapped or rewritten.

Seemingly, Sesame Street was so successful at grabbing the attention of young viewers that by the late 1970s there were concerns that the show had fundamentally lowered children’s attention span. While acknowledging that Sesame Street successfully taught children language and math, detractors voiced concerns that the show produced “overstimulation,” leading to “jumpy, unsocial, unteachable youngsters.”