'Ready to Learn' Results: Children Gain Reading Skills From Two PBS Shows

One features caped superheroes who fly "into" classic stories like The Three Little Pigs, using their knowledge of letters and words to change the endings. (Don't worry, there's still plenty of huffing and puffing.) The other one puts words front and center, turning them into props and lead characters, such as the wooly wonder whose body is actually formed out of cushiony-looking, three-dimensional letters of S H E E P.

In 2007, when PBS launched these two new television shows for 3 to 6 year olds -- Super Why! and Word World -- most parents saw them as just another couple of programs trying to elbow into the increasingly crowded children's TV market. But they have another dimension. They are part of a federally funded, five-year program to determine whether electronic media can help children learn to read -- and if so how.

Researchers are now releasing data from the first studies of these shows. Results are promising, with SuperWhy! helping children make large gains on the majority of tests of pre-reading skills and Word World having a somewhat lesser, though still significant, impact.

The research is part of the $24-million-a-year Ready to Learn Television program funded by the U.S. Department of Education through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and WTTW, a public television station in Chicago.

Deborah L. Linebarger, director of the Annenberg Center's Children's Media Program and an assistant professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, led the research on SuperWhy!. The Michael Cohen Group, an independent research firm in Chicago, studied Word World.

Children who watched SuperWhy!, according to one of the study's main findings, could call out the names of letters and their sounds more quickly than children who didn't see the show. Reading researchers have found that once children acquire this skill -- sometimes called letter fluency -- they can turn their attention on acquiring the next steps in learning to read. "They are able to move forward," Linebarger said, adding children with letter fluency become good at figuring out rhyming schemes -- like bat, cat, rat -- and start using that knowledge to put sounds together and read words.

In SuperWhy!, the characters sing the alphabet multiple times per show, and use different devices (like the magic wand carried by a superhero named Princess Presto) to point to, sound out and make the shapes of letters.

The show also closed some of the typical gaps in pre-reading skills seen between disadvantaged children and well-off children, according to a 58-page report of research findings. (Unfortunately, the findings have not yet been made public on the Department of Education Web site; Early Ed Watch received copies from the researchers.)

Children from lower-income families were behind middle-income children in tests of literacy skills at the beginning of the experiment, but after watching the show multiple times they reached the same level as the middle-income children, Linebarger said.

In the Word World study, children watching the show learned the vocabulary words that were highlighted on screen through either the characters or props. They could read or recognize those words at a significantly higher rate than children who didn't see the show, according to a 53-page slide presentation of the research. In addition, children of less-educated parents and children with the lowest vocabulary scores in pre-testing showed significant gains in phonemic awareness.

"Word World was effective in teaching what it set out to teach," Cohen said.

Both research groups designed their studies as classic experiments, with children of similar demographics randomly assigned to either a control group that didn't watch the shows or an experimental group that did. For the SuperWhy research, 171 children participated. More children participated in the Word World research: 798 children at five locations throughout the United States.

The SuperWhy! study showed small to medium "effect sizes" -- meaning that not only were there significant differences between the viewers and the non-viewers, but that the magnitude of those differences was relatively high in some cases. Effect sizes were not available for Word World research. Cohen said he is currently working to provide those numbers, adding that he suspects they will be "in the range we typically see in education," which is to say "healthy" but "not off the charts."

2010 will mark the 15^th year of the Ready to Learn Television program, which has consisted of three grant projects running for five years each. Some of the other television shows funded by the program include Between the Lions, Sesame Street, Martha Speaks (which launched in 2008) and the new version of The Electric Company (which just started airing this year). Unlike the previous two five-year studies, this one was specifically required by the Department of Education to produce research on what worked and to focus on literacy.

Forthcoming studies will explore whether new outreach and media projects -- like the gaming site called PBS Kids Island, which is part of a new "Raising Readers" initiative -- can also help to foster early reading skills.

"We're looking at the power of new emerging public service media as being a partner in educational improvement and reform in this country," said Susan Zelman, senior vice president for education and children's content at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "Our hope is we'll be seen as part of the solution" to a complex array of educational challenges for disadvantaged children.

At Early Ed Watch, we're examining data like this to determine how media -- both at home and in school settings -- can be used to supplement teachers' and parents' efforts to help all children acquire the reading skills they need to thrive in school. Surveys have shown that young children spend a considerable amount of time in front of TVs and computers, with average numbers ranging from one to three hours per day, or roughly seven to 21 hours per week. New data from parent diaries in the SuperWhy! research showed that children watched 5.6 hours of on-air television and spent 2.9 hours with DVDs and other videos each week.

Clearly, children are mediaphiles, and we share the conviction that media has to play a role in literacy learning. This doesn't mean advocating for more screen time, but for changing the nature of what they are already consuming. The trick is to ensure that what children see on screen is well-designed and intellectually stimulating enough to result in real results -- while preserving the fun elements of media that lead children to not even realize they are learning while they watch and play.

Related posts

Sesame Street and the Whole Child (5/27/09)

Digital Media, Literacy and the Linchpin: Well-Trained Teachers (3/25/09)

TV Research: Let's Get Smarter About What Young Children See, Hear and Experience (3/3/09)