The television series Sesame Street is concerned mainly with teaching
preschool skills to children age 3-5, with special emphasis on
reaching economically disadvantaged children. The show is
designed to hold young childrens' attention through action oriented,
short duration presentations teaching specific preschool cognitive
skills and some social skills. Each show is one hour and involves much
repetition of concepts within and across shows.
Does Sesame Street help economically disadvantaged children 'catch-up'
with economically advantaged children? In the early 1970s,
researchers at Educational Testing Service (the company that runs the
SAT) ran a study to evaluate Sesame Street. The researchers
sampled children representative of economically advantaged and
disadvantaged populations from five different sites in the United
States. To ensure the study contained a group of children that
watched Sesame Street regularly, they randomly assigned children either
to receive encouragement to watch Sesame Street or not to receive
encouragement. Those assigned to encouragement were given
promotional materials, and received weekly visits and phone calls from
ETS staff. Those assigned not to receive encouragement did not
get this attention. The children were tested on a variety of cognitive variables, including
knowledge of body parts, knowledge about letters, knowledge about
numbers, etc., both before and after viewing the series.
These data, available on Sakai in the "Class Datasets" folder, are part of a larger data set
used to evaluate the impact of Sesame Street. The names of
variables are shown in the code book below. Questions for the
Methods Assignment are posted in Sakai.
Code book with variable names
id : subject identification number
site : 1 =Three to five year old disadvantaged children from
inner city areas in various parts of the country.
2 = Four year old advantaged
suburban children.
3 = Advantaged rural children.
4 = Disadvantaged rural
children.
5 = Disadvantaged Spanish
speaking children.
sex male=1, female=2
age age in months
viewcat frequency of viewing
1=rarely watched the
show
2=once or twice a
week
3=three to five times
a week
4=watched the show on
average more than 5 times a week
setting: setting in which Sesame Street was viewed,
1=home 2=school
viewenc : treatment condition 1=child
encouraged to watch, 2=child not encouraged to watch
prebody : pretest on knowledge of body parts (scores range
from 0-32)
prelet : pretest on letters (scores range from 0-58)
preform : pretest on forms (scores range from 0-20)
prenumb : pretest on numbers (scores range from 0-54)
prerelat : pretest on relational terms (scores range from 0-17)
preclasf : pretest on classification skills
postbody : posttest on knowledge of body parts (0-32)
postlet : posttest on letters (0-58)
postform : posttest on forms (0-20)
postnumb : posttest on numbers (0-54)
postrelat : posttest on relational terms (0-17)
postclasf: posttest on classification skills
peabody: mental age score obtained from administration of
the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test as a pretest measure of vocabulary
maturity. Taken before the experimental intervention.
numbers: postnumb - prenumb. Variable constructed by
Prof. Reiter.
letters: postlet - prelet. Variable constructed by
Prof. Reiter.
num.let: numbers - letters. Variable constructed by
Prof. Reiter.