Television as a teaching tool - the creation of Sesame Street

Sesame Street is best known for the creative geniuses it attracted, people like Jim Henson and Joe Raposo and Frank Oz, who intuitively grasped what it takes to get through to children. But it is a mistake to think of Sesame Street as a project conceived in a flash of insight. What made the show unusual, in fact, was the extent to which it was exactly the opposite of that - the extent to which the final product was deliberately and painstakingly engineered. Sesame Street was built about a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.

This may seem obvious, but it isn't. Many critics of television, to this day, argue that what's dangerous about TV is that it is addictive, that children and even adults watch it like zombies. According to this view, it is the formal features of television - violence, bright lights, loud and funny noises, quick editing cuts, zooming in and out, exaggerated action, and all the other things we associate with commercial TV - that hold our attention. In other words, we don't have to understand what we are looking at, or absorb what we are seeing, in order to keep watching. That's what many people mean when they say that television is passive. We watch when we are stimulated by all the whizzes and bangs of the medium. And we look away or turn the channel, when we are bored.

What the pioneering television researchers of the 1960s and 1970s - in particular, Daniel Anderson at the University of Massachusetts - began to realise, however, is that this isn't how preschoolers watch TV at all. "Once we began to look carefully at what children were doing, we found out that short looks were actually more common, said Elizabeth Lorch, a psychologist at Amberst College. "Children didn't just sit and stare. They could divide their attention between a couple of different activities. And they weren't being random. There were predictable influences on what made them look back at the screen, and these were not trivial things, not just flash and dash."

Lorch, for instance, once reedited an episode of Sesame Street so that certain key scenes of some of the sketches were out of order. If kids were only interested in flash and dash, that shouldn't have made a difference. The show, after all, still had songs and Muppets and bright colours and action and all the things the make Sesame Street so wonderful. But it did make a difference. The kids stopped watching. If they couldn't make sense of what they were looking at, they weren't going to look at it.

In another experiment, Lorch and Dan Anderson showed two groups of five-year olds an episode of Sesame Street. The kids in the second group, however, were put in a room with lots of very attractive toys on the floor. As you would expect, the kids in the room without the toys watched the show about 87 percent of the time, while the kids with the toys watched only about 47 percent of the show. Kids are distracted by toys. But when they tested the two groups to see how much of the show the children remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. This result stunned the two researchers. Kids, they realised, were a great deal more sophisticated in the way they watched than had been imagined. "We were led to the conclusion," they wrote, "that five-year-olds in the toys group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what for them were the most important parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention."

If you take these two studies together - the toys study and the editing study - you reach quite a radical conclusion about children and television. Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference. It means if you want to know whether - and what - kids are learning from a TV show, all you have to do is to notice what they are watching. And if you want to know what kids aren't learning, all you have to do is notice what they aren't watching.

The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task.

Palmer's innovation was something he called the Distractor. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds.

"We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine," said Palmer. "We would have a body riding down the steet with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea." Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second-by-second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers' attention and what parts did not.

"The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they'd go back to the drawing board."

Palmer tested other child's shows, like the Tom and Jerry cartoons or Captain Kangaroo, and compared what sections of those shows worked with what sections of Sesame Street worked. Whatever Palmer learned, he fed back to the show's producers and writers, so they could fine-tune the material accordingly. One of the standard myths about children's television, for example, had always been that kids love to watch animals. "The producers would bring in a cat or an anteater or an otter and show it and let it cavort around," Palmer says. "They thought that would be interesting. But our Distracter showed that it was a bomb everytime."

The Distractor showed that no single segment of the Sesame Street format should go beyond four minutes, and that three minutes was probably optimal. He forced the producers to simplify dialogue and abandon certain techniques they had taken from adult television.

When the show was originally conceived, the decision was made that all fantasy elements of the show be separated from the real elements. This was done at the insistence of many child psychologists, who felt that to mix fantasy and reality would be misleading to children. [But the distractor showed that] as soon as they switched to the street scenes [with only real adults and children, and no muppets] the kids lost all interest. "The street was supposed to be the glue," Lesser said. "We would always come back to the street. It pulled the show together. But it was just adults doing things and talking about stuff and the kids weren't interested. Levels would pop back up if the Muppets came back, but we couldn't afford to keep losing them like that."

Lesser decided to defy the opinion of his scientific advsiers. "We decided to write a letter to all the other developmental psychologists and say, we know how you guys think about mixing fantasy and reality. But we're going to do it anyway. If we don't, we'll be dead in the water." So the producers went back and reshot all of the street scenes. Henson and his coworkers created puppets who could walk and talk with the adults of the show and could live alongside them on the street.

The Distractor, however, for all its strengths, is a fairly crude instrument. It tells you that a child understands what is happening on the screen and as a result is paying attention. But it doesn't tell you what the child understands, or more precisely, it doesn't tell you whether the child is paying attention to what he or she ought to be paying attention to.

Consider the following two Sesame Street segments, both of which are called visual blending exercises - segments that teach children that reading consists of blending together distinct sounds. In one, "Hug", a female Muppet, approaches the word HUG in the center of the screen. She stands behind the H, sounding it out carefully, then moves to the U, and then G. She does it again, moving from left to right, pronouncing each letter separately, before putting the sounds together to say "hug."

In another segment, called "Oscar's Blending," Oscar the Grouch and the Muppet Crummy play a game called "Breakable Words," in which words are assembled and then taken apart. Oscar starts by calling for a C, which pops up on the lower left corner of the screen. The letter C, Oscar tells Crummy, is pronounced "cuh." Then the letters at pop up in the lower right-hand corner and Crummy sounds the letters out - "at." The two go back and forth - Oscar saying "cuh " and Crummy "at" - each time faster and faster, until the sounds blend together to make "cat." As this happens, the letters at the bottom of the screen move together as well to make "cat." The two Muppets repeat "cat" a few times and then the word drops from sight, accompanied by a crashing sound. Then the process begins again with the word "bat."

Both of these segments are entertaining. They hold children's attention. On the Distractor, they score brilliantly. But do they actually teach the fundamentals of reading? That's a much harder question. To answer it, the producers of Sesame Street in the mid 1970s called in a group of researchers at Harvard University led by a psychologist named Barbara Flagg who were expert in something called eye movement photography. Eye movement research is based on the idea that the human eye is capable of focusing on only a very small area at one time - what is called a perceptual span. When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time. We jump from one of these chunks to another, pausing - or fixating - on them long enough to make sense of each letter. The reason we can focus clearly on only that much text is that most of the sensors in our eyes - the receptors that process what we see - are clustered in a small region in the very middle of the retina called the fovea. That's why we move our eyes when we read: we can't pick up much information about the shape, or the colour, or the structure of words unless we focus on fovea directly on them. Just try, for example, to reread this paragraph by staring straight ahead at the center of the page. It's impossible.

If you can track where someone's fovea is moving and what they are fixating on, in other words, you can tell with extraordinary precision what they are actually looking at and what kind of information they are actually receiving. Sesame Street went to Harvard in 1975 to answer the question - When kids watched "Oscar's Blending" or "Hug", were they watching and learning about the words, or were they simply watching the Muppets?

The experiment was conducted with twenty-one four- and five-year olds, who were brought to the Harvard School of Education over the course of a week by their parents. What they found was that "Hug" was a resounding success - seventy-six percent of all fixations were on the letters. Better still, 83 percent of all preschoolers fixated on the letters in a left-to-right sequence - mimicking, in other words, the actual reading process. "Oscar's Blending", on the other hand, was a disaster. Only 35 percent of total fixations fell on the letters. And exactly zero percent of the preschoolers read the letters from left to right.

What was the problem? First, the letter shouldn't have been on the bottom of the screen because, as almost all eye movement research demonstrates, when it comes to television people tend to fixate on the centre of the screen. That issue, though is really secondary to the simple fact that the kids weren't watching the letters because they were watching Oscar. "I remember Oscar's Blending," Flagg says. "Oscar was very active. He was really making afuss in the background, and the word is not close to him at all. He's moving his mouth a lot, moving his hands. He has things in his hands. There is a great deal of distraction. The kids don't focus on the letters at all because Oscar is so interesting."

The creators of Sesame Street discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television's weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable.

An extract from The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference, Malcolm Gladwell, Abacus, 2001.