Ideas and Findings

Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie may be good at teaching preschoolers the alphabet. But when it comes to teaching reading, they may be delivering the wrong kinds of messages.

So say two researchers who analyzed 10 episodes of the popular children's public-television show "Sesame Street" to see whether it reflects current thinking on the development of children's literacy skills. Writing in the current issue of The Reading Teacher , Barbara Fowles Mates and Linda Strommen note that of the 350 segments they viewed, only 184 had literacy-related content.

Those bits focused mostly on the names, shapes, and sounds of individual letters. What the researchers wanted to see instead was more emphasis on the context in which words appear and on the usefulness...