Big Bad Bird?

__"Educational Television Is Not an Oxymoron" by Daniel R. Anderson, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (May 1998), 3937 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104.__

"The worst thing about Sesame Street is that people believe it is educationally valuable," grumped Jane Healy about Big Bird and his friends in her 1990 jeremiad, Endangered Minds. She and other critics claim that the long-running, fast-paced PBS television program mesmerizes youngsters, renders them intellectually passive, shortens their attention spans, and interferes with their language development.

Extensive research cited by Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, shows that, to use a bit of Sesame Street argot, the criticism "just doesn’t belong."

Instead of being mesmerized, preschoolers seem to engage in "selective looking," he says. Put in a room with toys, the children looked at and away from the TV screen relatively often—an average of 150 looks an hour, some only brief glances, others lasting several minutes. Older kids tended to pay more attention.

"If, as Healy and others claim, attention to Sesame Street is reflexively driven by visual movement and shot changes," Anderson points out, "then attention should be maintained even if the program becomes difficult or impossible to understand." But when he and his associates made the show’s dialogue less comprehensible (e.g., by putting it in Greek), the children paid much less attention. That showed, Anderson says, that meaning matters. Healy drew a different conclusion: that children easily give up on TV that is challenging. But Anderson cites another study of educational TV which found that making an announcement for children somewhat harder to understand but still within their "developmental level" did not prompt young viewers to turn away.

The claim that Sesame Street’s short segments and fast pace reduce the attention spans of young viewers seems to have arisen from a 1975 report that attributed the "hyperactive" behavior of two-year-olds to watching the program. But the study had no control group (i.e. a comparison group that did not watch the program). And when Anderson and his colleagues made both an exceptionally fast-paced version of the program and a slow one, they found that preschoolers’ postshow attention spans did not change.

Despite the intellectual passivity rap, Anderson concludes that research indicates that young children "are about as cognitively active and engaged" with educational TV programs as they are when they read or listen to stories.

In fact, he notes, several studies show that, even allowing for level of parent education and other characteristics, children who watch Sesame Street generally score better than others on tests of vocabulary and readiness for school. The payoff is apparently long-lasting, according to a major study published last year. It found that among 570 high school students, those who had watched such programs as Sesame Street as five-year-olds frequently had higher high school grades in English, math, and science. That result should give even Oscar the Grouch something to smile about.