Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 27, 2021

Sesame Street research concerns the children's television show Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969. Unlike earlier children's programming, producers used research and more than 1,000 studies and experiments to create the show and test its impact on its young viewers' learning. By the end of the program's first season, the organization founded to oversee Sesame Street production, Children's Television Workshop (CTW), had developed what came to be called the "CTW model": a system of planning, production, and evaluation that combined the expertise of researchers and early childhood educators with that of the program's writers, producers, and directors. CTW utilized independent summative evaluations conducted by the Educational Testing Service during the show's first two seasons to measure the program's educational effectiveness. Based on these findings, the researchers compiled a body of data and the producers changed the show accordingly. The formative research on Sesame Street was the first time children's television viewing was studied scientifically. (Full article...)