A 1970 evaluation tested whether Sesame Street really taught

The short answer

Sesame Street's first season was not simply broadcast and hoped for; it was measured. A 1970 evaluation tested thousands of preschoolers before and after the show's first six months on air, and it found that children who watched more of the programme learned more of what it set out to teach. That finding is a reason large field evaluations, not just audience ratings, became the normal expectation for children's educational media.

What the evidence says

Educational Testing Service, commissioned by the show's creator, the Children's Television Workshop, tested 943 preschoolers across five sites: Boston, Durham, Phoenix, suburban Philadelphia and a rural area of northeastern California, according to the ETS evaluation. Children were sorted into four quartiles by how often they watched, from rarely or never to five or more times a week, then tested on letters, numbers, sorting and other targeted goals. Among the 741 children classed as disadvantaged, average gains on the combined test score rose steadily with viewing, from about 19 points in the lowest quartile to about 47 points in the highest. Three-year-olds who watched most gained more than older children watching the same amount, some overtaking slower-watching four- and five-year-olds by the second test. Advantaged children in suburban Philadelphia also gained with viewing, but heavy-viewing disadvantaged children caught up to or passed light-viewing advantaged children, narrowing rather than widening the starting gap.

For context

This was not a randomised trial: children were not assigned how much to watch, and the evaluation flags that heavier viewers had parents with higher achievement expectations and that viewing was linked to how many things a child owned at home, plausible confounds a quartile comparison cannot rule out. A subgroup of 43 Spanish-speaking children in Phoenix showed some of the largest gains in the study, but the report cautions that conclusions there must be drawn "with great care" given the small numbers. It is also worth naming that the evaluator was paid by the programme's own creator, even though Educational Testing Service ran the fieldwork independently. Sesame Workshop's own site, retrieved 16 September 2026, still describes research as central to its mission, though newer materials, such as a 2025 brand-tracking survey of parental perception, are a different kind of evidence from a controlled study.

A practical next step

When a programme, app or toy is advertised as "educational," it can help to ask what was actually tested: a real skill measured before and after use, in something like the original design, or simply how much children or parents liked it.

• Was the claim about this media tested against a specific skill, or only assumed from its content?
• If heavier users of a product score better, what else about their household might explain that?
• Would this evidence hold up if a comparison group had never used the product at all?

The 1970 evaluation did not settle every question about Sesame Street, and its own authors were candid about the limits of a non-randomised design. What it did was establish a habit: test the audience actually reached, not the audience imagined.