When Sesame Street first aired in 1969, many critics frowned. Media theorist Neil Postman captured the scepticism perfectly: television, he argued, was a medium for entertainment, not for education. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), he warned that children watching Sesame Street were learning that learning itself should always be fun — and therefore, he feared, superficial.

I still ask my students to read Postman’s book, forty years on. They’re often startled by how relevant it remains.

And yet, few television programmes have ever been studied so thoroughly. Now that the series, more than fifty years later, is coming to Netflix, it seems a good time to ask: what do we actually know about its effects?

From Experiment to Global Research

To find out, every single segment was tested with children before being broadcast. This systematic collaboration between educators, psychologists and television producers later became known as the CTW model, named after the Children’s Television Workshop, the organisation behind the show.

That model was revolutionary: researchers literally sat beside the scriptwriters. Every sketch, song, and Muppet scene was pre-tested for clarity, attention, and learning impact (formative research). What didn’t work was cut. Independent studies (summative research) then measured what children had actually learned.

This process — moving from creative intuition to empirical testing — made Sesame Street an early example of evidence-informed design. The CTW model has since inspired a host of educational programmes and digital learning platforms, from Blue’s Clues to today’s edutainment apps.

The Numbers Tell the Story

In the early years, the US Educational Testing Service (ETS) published dozens of studies. After twenty years of research, the conclusion was clear (Murphy, 1991): children who regularly watched Sesame Street scored significantly higher in language, maths and school readiness. The effects were most substantial among children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and they remained measurable up to ten years later.

A thirty-year review (Fisch, Truglio, & Cole, 1999) reached the same conclusion: Sesame Street has had lasting positive effects on reading, mathematics, and social skills, both in the United States and in international co-productions such as Plaza Sésamo (Mexico) and Sisimpur (Bangladesh).

A later meta-analysis by Mares and Pan (2013), covering fifteen countries and more than ten thousand children, confirmed the pattern. The average effects were significantly positive across three domains: cognitive skills (such as language and numeracy), world knowledge (including health, safety, and science), and social attitudes (empathy and respect for others). Even in countries where fewer than ten per cent of children attended preschool, Sesame Street was often one of the only consistent sources of early cognitive stimulation.

More Than Letters and Numbers

What makes Sesame Street unique is that it was never just about teaching letters and numbers. In Kosovo, it encouraged respect across languages; in South Africa, it openly discussed HIV; in the US, it helped young viewers deal with grief or a parent in prison. None of these themes was chosen at random. They were developed and tested with local researchers.

It’s the kind of approach that now seems self-evident, though perhaps, if we’re honest, it may not be as common today as it once was.

And the Research Still Doesn’t Stop

Even now, more than fifty years after its first broadcast, Sesame Street remains a subject of interest to researchers. In 2024, Shalom Fisch, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues published a new experimental study of the show’s recent “playful learning” episodes, centred on the motto “I wonder, what if, let’s try!”

Over a hundred preschoolers watched these episodes several times. The results were striking: children who watched more frequently used a greater variety of problem-solving strategies and became more efficient in applying them, even with new tasks they had never encountered before. They weren’t merely learning the correct answers. They were learning how to think.

The study confirms what Sesame Street has shown since 1969: well-designed educational media can do more than transmit knowledge. It can teach young children to think, to experiment, to fail and try again — precisely what Postman once doubted television could ever do.

References

This is just a small selection, by way of illustration. E.g. the definitive book on Sesame Street research is missing from this list because I couldn’t find my own copy anywhere on my bookshelves at home.

• Choi, K. (2021). Sesame Street: Beyond 50. Journal of Children and Media, 15(4), 597–603.
• Fisch, S. M., Fletcher, K., Abdurokhmonova, G., Davis, L., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & colleagues. (2024). “I wonder, what if, let’s try”: Sesame Street’s playful learning curriculum impacts children’s problem solving. Journal of Children and Media, 18(3), 334–350.*
• Fisch, S. M., Truglio, R. T., & Cole, C. F. (1999). The impact of Sesame Street on preschool children: A review and synthesis of 30 years’ research. Media Psychology, 1(2), 165–190.*
• Mares, M.-L., & Pan, Z. (2013). Effects of Sesame Street: A meta-analysis of children’s learning in 15 countries. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 34(3), 140–151.*
• Murphy, R. T. (1991). Educational effectiveness of Sesame Street: A review of the first twenty years of research. ETS Research Report Series.