Posted on 06/08/2015 11:57:07 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
...After “Sesame Street” was introduced, children living in places where its broadcast could be more readily received saw a 14 percent drop in their likelihood of being behind in school. Levine and Kearney note in their paper that a wide body of previous research has found that Head Start, the pre-kindergarten program for low-income Americans, delivers a similar benefit.
The researchers also say those effects probably come from “Sesame Street’s” focus on presenting viewers with an academic curriculum, heavy on reading and math, that would appear to have helped prepare children for school.
While it might seem implausible that a TV show could have such effects, the results build on Nixon-era government studies that found big short-term benefits in watching the show, along with years of focus-group studies by the team of academic researchers who help write “Sesame Street” scripts. Several outside researchers have reviewed the study, and none are known to have questioned its results.
The new findings offer comforting news for parents who plopped their children in front of public TV every day and/or memorized entire Elmo DVDs, unwittingly.
They also raise a provocative question, at a time when many lawmakers are pushing to expand spending on early-childhood education: Do kids need preschool if a TV show works just as well?
Yes, say the economists – and the “Sesame Street” educational team. Head Start, Kearney and Levine write, was designed to provide more than an academic boost: It delivers family support, medical and dental services, and development of emotional skills that help kids in social settings.
Levine and Kearney see the study as a clear lesson in the value of a (very cheap) mass-media complement to preschool. The potentially controversial implication they embrace from the study isn’t about early-childhood education. It’s about college, and the trend toward low-cost massive open online courses, or MOOCs....."
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
LINK to paper: Study Finds Sesame Street Improves School Readiness
Anecdotally. No
College professors blame SS in particular for their students’ demand to be entertained
(Source - wrote a paper in college decades ago about this very subject. Was fascinated at how deliberate CTW's specific goals were).
Sesame Street has always served up garbage. When I was a kid, my older brother got a beautiful Zeiss biological microscope. He had prepared slides of bacteria, and learned how to use biological stains, a microtome and other techniques. He showed me living unicellular creatures living in a ditch by our house. That exposure got me into science while my brother eventually became an attorney, go figure. Counting to eleven with a stuffed animal isn’t education, it’s dumbing down.
It always looked like political conditioning to me.
Well, given that Sesame Street's target audience starts at 3-years-old...
Agreed. I can remember a few years ago the program being discussed on a different thread here. Some commented on how they found it could be very nasty in some instances and as a result did not want their kids to watch it. Funny how I remember things like that and that actually those people were quite right in saying so.
I preferred Looney Tunes, Road Runner, Tom & Jerry, Little Rascals, and Jonny Quest to get my entertainment and a few scientific tidbits from the ACME Corporation.
It has been many years but I don’t ever remember kindergarten as being educational so much as its primary benefit for me being making friends and connecting with others your age - something TV can’t teach you.
Kindergarten today, idk, it may be nothing but an indoctrination check-in point.
Now Schools of Education teach HOW to teach.
“Conveniently” the Internet has many sites with lesson plans.
Buyer beware.
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/lesson/?ar_a=1
Look at just WHO “Children’s Television Workshop(Sesame Street)’s” partners ARE; http://www.sesameworkshop.org/partners/partners/ LOTS AND LOTS of “Questionable” “Characters”!
Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most crackle.
At the same time, “Sesame Street” relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read—no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be considered a nuisance....
We now know that “Sesame Street” encourages children to love school only if school is like “Sesame Street.” Which is to say, we now know that “Sesame Street” undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2337731-amusing-ourselves-to-death-public-discourse-in-the-age-of-show-business
This is an interesting piece from the other day. "....When the priority becomes raising average test scores, individual needs are lost sight of. Both high achievers and low achievers are poorly served as resources are focused on raising the average classroom scores, but it is especially the high achievers who suffer. The message to these students, those who have the greatest potential to make important contributions to society, is “pass the test and you’re done.” That should never be the message of teachers or schools. The classroom should demand the most from students, not the minimum. Students should be challenged and inspired, not told that their task is to pass a standardized test written by Washington officials.
Common Core also fails because it imposes national standards over state and local priorities. It is unlikely that students from west Texas will have the same background or interests as students from Manhattan or south Florida. It is likely that the literary tastes of students from Vermont differ from those of students from Oklahoma. Students should not be made to study the same material or to arrive at the same conclusions. But under Common Core, the local culture that determines so much of how one thinks must be suppressed. The standardized material censors out all local “bias,” except of course the politically correct bias of liberals in Washington.
One of the most insidious aspects of Common Core is the potential for federal officials to impose not just neutral standards, but ideologically biased content in the name of testing. When nearly every question in the reading section hinges on race, class, and gender, schools are forced to inculcate a leftist ideology. When science questions focus on climate change and social science stresses income equality, schools move farther to the left.
Even by its own minimal standards, Common Core fails, because it generates resistance on the part of students and teachers. Even if one discounts the effect on high achievers and the ideological bias of Common Core, its effectiveness in reaching the goal of basic competency must be questioned. Once students are led to believe that the purpose of education is to pass a test of any kind, respect for learning has been compromised. Miss Jones understood this truth about education......."
That speaks very badly about the incompetents who teach preschool.
Same with me. Although I watched SS as a kid in the 1970s, Bugs Bunny and Road Runner and the Muppet Show and Filmation cartoons and live action shows were more of my liking. Also liked “The Electric Company” (not afraid to admit Judy Graubart was an early TV crush of mine).
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins. Now there was a TV show. There is something about watching a lioness sink her fangs into the neck of a gazelle that captures the interest youngsters in a positive way, and is applicable to the real world.
“The Rifleman” had good life lessons.
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