For nearly four decades, Sesame Workshop has brought the joy of learning to the world's youngest citizens through the introduction of locally-produced coproductions of the preschool television series, "Sesame Street". Many of these television shows have been specifically designed to forward important prosocial messages directly linked to…

The results of a field study, a controlled experiment, and clinical observations on the educational effects of "Sesame Street" on Israeli children are summarized in this report. An overview section presents the general format and major findings, the next section describes the background setting of the studies, a method section covers the…

Using 280 5th graders as subjects, an experiment was carried out to answer the following questions: (1) do certain indentified television formats have effects on cognition? (2) Is mastery of various cognitive skills correlated with extraction of knowledge from a television message which employs the corresponding format? It was hypothesized that:…

This is an initial examination of findings from laboratory and field studies done in Israel on the cognition-cultivating functions of media. The studies reasoned that highly explicit presentations of film-mediated operations can be imitated by observers, and that once imitated, they are internalized and can serve as modified mental skills. Two…

The purpose of this parent education project was to strengthen the Israeli family as an educational unit, to increase its ability and knowledge in the field of education, and to broaden the range of responsibility and influence of the family over its young children. The first stage of this project was devoted to problems of early childhood. A…

The airing of "Sesame Street" on Israeli television in 1971 provided an opportunity to study the effects of a sophisticated media format on a media naive audience. Samples of 93 kindergarteners and 224 second and third graders of mixed socioeconomic background were pre- and posttested for cognitive skills and media literacy. After…