A note on Sesame Street...

This morning while I was nursing the baby, my dear three-year-old figured out how to turn on the TV in the other room. This is problematic because a.) he has not figured out the TiVO yet and who knows what might be on the TV when he turns it on (although that TV is set to record mostly PBS kids shows, it would probably still be on that channel and appropriate for viewing) and b.) he's a couch potato wanna-be (we limit his viewing, but it's never enough for him), but this morning, it sort of worked out because there was a clip on Sesame Street about Dinosaurs.  Here are the points the clip in Elmo's World made as a little girl narrated a trip to the American Museum of Natural History:

• Dinosaurs are not alive anymore
• We can learn about them at museums like the American Museum of Natural History.
• Paleontologists dig up the fossils and bones and put together skeletons to see how big dinosaurs are
• Barosaurus has the longest neck in North America
• Triceratops has three big horns and a big collar
• Dinosaur eggs are small, even though dinosaurs get really big
• Tyrannosaurus rex has tiny arms and big legs and sharp teeth to eat meat with
• Stegosaurus has plates on its back
• Apatosaurus is humongeous and made of 350 dinosaur bones

Then, Elmo spoke with a dinosaur muppet, who told him the following info:

• Dinosaurs lived 150 million years ago 
• During that time the dinosaurs saw asteroids, watched the sun rise and set, comets, trees with leaves, lakes, and both small and big dinosaurs
• Elmo asked this Dinosaur muppet if he had birds in his neighborhood (you know, like Sesame Street has Big Bird) to which the Dinosaur replied that they had a pterasaur that flew in the sky (not a bird).  Then they did the ridiculous part where Dorothy (Elmo's fish) imagines Elmo morphed into a fuzzy red pterosaur while the dinosaur continues to tell Elmo that Dinosaurs lived alongside frogs, turtles, mice, and crocodiles.
• He went on to tell Elmo that some dinosaurs ate leaves all day long while others ate meat, including other dinosaurs.  

This is all appropriate information, however, it was rattled off so quickly that I wonder how much of it really sank in. If I need to rewind twice just to type notes (not type verbatim) and I'm a decent typist, it's too fast for a 3 year old (Sesame Street's targeted age). While the quick pacing of Sesame Street's clips has been studied (Anderson, Levin & Pugzles Lorch, 1977), it is not implicated as a factor contributing to hyperactivity and/or poor attention spans in preschoolers in the short term. However, in 2004, Christakis found that each hour of television watched (on average) between the ages of one and three years old increased the probability (by 10%) of a reported attention problem by age 7. Sesame Street has actually slowed down and went from the non-sequitur educational clip show that it was when I was growing up to its more narrative format now. This change was to shift the target age down from 4 to 3, since younger kids were now watching tv. But even "slowed down" in Elmos's World (which was CREATED for toddlers), this seemed really fast. While Sesame Street has documented school readiness outcomes (largely the three R's, e.g., Wright et al., 2001), I think they fall short on creating organized thematic knowledge in science. It is perhaps a first exposure to an area, but not interactive nor well-organized in terms of its presentation. It is entirely passive. Watching this really made me miss Mister Rogers. His show left time for children's responses and he presented the theme of the day in an organized fashion, where knowledge was built up slowly for the children to digest.

The plus side, is that my son now wants to go to a Natural History Museum to learn more!