Abstract
This is a re-analysis of data collected in an evaluation of Sesame Street. The data were obtained from 695 kindergarten-aged children randomly selected from five areas of the United States. The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of Sesame Street in a multi-variate framework, and to develop production functions showing the contributions which could be derived from the production function paradigm, most especially what might be gained by examining the possible results of mixing television viewing with teacher effort.
The major findings are that the more a child watches Sesame Street, the more he learns; the higher a child's social class the more he learns from watching the program; and that Sesame Street does not affect disadvantaged children more than advantaged children, and hence has limited utility as a means of reducing differences in school performance between the rich and poor. Limitations in the data prevented calculation of production functions estimating trade-offs between teacher input and television viewing, but the limited data available suggest that mixes are better than either teacher alone or television alone.
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This research was partially supported by Grant #Y-NGL-008-054 from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of their colleagues in Washington University's Center for Development Technology.
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Anderson, B.D., Greenberg, E. & Mark, J. The educational technology mix: Production functions from “Sesame Street”. Instr Sci 8, 67–79 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00054982
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00054982