Reading Questions - Assignment Example

Education – Sesame Street Order No. 601438 What finding or conclusion was most surprising to you? Why? The findings and conclusions derived from this analysis has been very surprising indeed. Purists who do not allow children to watch television might be shocked to find that television has become a major source of learning especially with regard to pre-schoolers and toddlers. The main television show which has proved that television viewing can work extremely well as a medium for teaching is Sesame Street.

Sesame Street has been a much loved programme for many years and a study made on various groups of children has proven to increase the children’s knowledge levels when viewed as a group, at home, or during school, but in moderation. The findings in ‘Sesame Street’ has also shown to improve various complex cognitive skills of children such as classifying and sorting and also among simpler skills such as numbers and names. These results were achieved even despite various field and measurement problems.

Typically, researchers in the field of educational are considered to be the historians of the different policies and practices of Education and whose works are rarely used to make any changes to current or future happenings. Considering this situation, Sesame Street comes as rather a surprise since most people are against children watching television. But if these findings conducted through Sesame Street were to be ignored, and not developed further, funded or researched by similarly conceived television shows, then it would be a travesty and a huge loss to the future of our educational system.2) Look at the OERL quality critreia for evaluation reports.

Pick out three criteria and tell how they are evidenced in the Sesame Street report summary.The first criteria chosen are the Project Features which comprises of the goals and objectives which involve both explicit and implicit features. The Sesame program also speaks of the primary activities and resources that would be used to achieve these goals and the possible short and long term outcomes. The Sesame Street Report reflects the same criteria given above. The primary goal of the Sesame Street program was to give evidence that a program such as this, benefited children by enhancing their cognitive and skill abilities for better educational outcomes.

The project was so designed, making use of pretests and posttests which gave enough proof to show that these goals were achieved. The outcomes as evidenced in the Sesame project was long term and benefited children coming from varied backgrounds.The second criteria evidenced in the Sesame Street program were the different stakeholders which included the child, parents, teachers and peer groups. The program was looked at from different perspectives to evaluate which combination was most effective.

Viewing the Sesame program with either the teacher or peer group benefited the child but not as much as when the child viewed the program with the parents and discussed the details with them. The outcome in the report evidenced that the parent- child relationship in viewing the Sesame program was the best as it signified better cognitive and skill outcomes than when with other stakeholder groups because it had a better and lasting impact on them.The third criteria is for the purpose of evaluation.

In this context the Sesame Street program has very clear cut goals and objectives which include evaluating data and giving evidence that such a television program is highly beneficial for children coming from varied backgrounds because it improved their knowledge, skills and abilities in a much better way, when children view this program on television on a regular basis. The data collected from the targeted participants were compared and assessed to evaluate the progress made by them.ReferenceBall, Sameul; and others.

The First Year of Sesame Street. An Evaluation Final Report. Educational Testing Service, Princeton ., N.J