Leveraging mass media to support playful learning: The development and evaluation of Sesame Street’s playful problem solving curriculum
This special section documents the integration of theory and practice in creating and evaluating an educational television series. We examine Sesame Street’s curriculum focus on “playful problem solving” in Seasons 51 and 52. Drawing on the theoretical orientation of Playful Learning (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016), these seasons of Sesame Street embed Playful Learning approaches into engineering-based problem-solving to foster children’s curiosity, critical thinking skills, and perseverance.
The papers trace the development of this curriculum from its theoretical underpinnings through its implementation in the series and subsequent impact on its target audience.
Fletcher, Pesch, Wright, Abdurokhmonova, and Hirsh- Pasek provide a theoretical foundation for Playful Learning as a pedagogical approach, discussing how it can support both what and how children learn. Truglio and Seibert Nast detail the development, refinement, and implementation of Sesame Street’s playful problem-solving curriculum, including formative research data to inform the production of Seasons 51 and 52.
The next two papers turn to summative research that evaluated program effectiveness in promoting preschool children’s learning. Fisch, Fletcher, and colleagues present an empirical, pretest/posttest, experimental/control study that documents children’s learning from playful problem-solving episodes of Sesame Street. Fisch, Hirsh-Pasek, and colleagues delve more deeply into the innovative remote methods developed to conduct the evaluation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Foulds and colleagues bring the discussion full circle by demonstrating that “theory to practice” can also be reciprocal. They show how empirical data and production experiences are now informing further evolution of the playful problem-solving approach, guiding outreach initiatives and international efforts across multiple media platforms for early and middle childhood.
We hope this peek behind the curtain helps guide others’ efforts to merge theory and practice, and to share their insights and experiences in forums like this one, so that educators, producers, and researchers can reap mutual benefit from coming together in a spirit of (in the words of the Muppets) “I wonder. . . What if . . . Let’s try!”
The above cover image is used with permission granted by Sesame Workshop.