Summative Evaluation of Dragon Tales
CONDUCTED FOR
SESAME
WORKSHOP
New York, NY
by
Dr.
Langbourne W. Rust
LANGBOURNE RUST RESEARCH, INC.
©
2001
Sesame Workshop All Rights
Reserved
Table of Contents
Composite
Devereux Ratings............................................................................................................................... 9
Co-viewing Rates Per Program......................................................................................................................... 33
Adult
Co-Viewer Involvement............................................................................................................................ 34
This
is a summative evaluation of whether the children's TV series, Dragon Tales, is meeting its educational
objectives. Dragon Tales was produced with funding from the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting through the U.S. Department of Education and created to fit
within the Ready to Learn block of programming on PBS.
The series was designed to help children 2 to 6 years old (with a primary emphasis on reaching 4 year olds) develop strategies for meeting challenges in their lives: social challenges like developing and maintaining relationships, emotional challenges like coping with fears, physical challenges like learning new skills (e.g., learning to ride a bicycle) and cognitive challenges like trying to follow clues and solve problems.
Within
the framework of enhancing children's readiness to face challenges, three educational
goals were defined for the series:
·
To encourage young children to pursue the challenging experiences that
support their growth and development.
·
To help young children recognize that there are many ways to approach
and learn from the challenging experiences in their lives.
·
To help young children understand that to try and not succeed is a
natural and valuable part of learning.
To
achieve its goals, Dragon Tales
presents children with a magical world on the TV screen where two young
children, Emmy and Max, and their dragon friends have adventures together. Along the way they face the kinds of
challenges that young children are likely to face. The educational premise is that by using
dramatic situations to convey the kinds of developmental challenges faced by
the viewers themselves, and by providing them with models for coping with them,
they will become emotionally invested, pay attention to what the characters do,
and expand their repertoires for facing the challenges in their own lives.
Facing
challenges requires getting children to see situations in terms of goals or
objectives, and to respond by taking initiative and trying to master them. Therefore, the kinds of models that Dragon Tales characters provide entail
framing goals, trying different approaches to solve a problem, and persisting
until an appropriate resolution is reached. In addition, the series also models
the benefits of collaborating with others to meet the challenges that they
face.
The
primary objective of the current study was to find out whether regular watching
of Dragon Tales has a positive effect
on 4-5 year old children's pursuit of challenges in their everyday lives and on
their establishment of collaborative relationships with others. Secondary objectives were to determine
whether the show is appealing, involving and comprehensible, whether it
stimulates interaction between parents and children and whether it gets
integrated into children's lives, beyond the immediate context of the TV
viewing situation.
The
project was broken down into 3 studies, two using school viewing, one using
home viewing.
School Viewing
Overall Effects Study - evaluated the cumulative
effects of Dragon Tales, when it is
viewed on a daily basis for several weeks, by measuring pre-test/post-test
changes on a number of resilience factors related to facing challenges and
forming collaborative relationships. A control group, which viewed a different
educational TV series (Between the Lions),
provided a baseline for separating the effects of program content from normal
developmental changes over the viewing period. The control program was selected
because its curricular objectives, which focus on reading, have little overlap
with the Dragon Tales curriculum. Consequently, the control program
(which has been shown to be educationally effective in other research) was not
expected to have a significant impact on the variables measured in this study
relative to the experimental group.
Episode Attention and
Comprehension Study - evaluated children's attention levels and comprehension of emotional
and goal-oriented content in a selected number of Dragon Tales shows. The
control program provided a point of comparison for assessing attention levels
to Dragon Tales.
Home Viewing
Home-Viewing Study - evaluated natural home
viewing patterns, program appeal and the relationship of Dragon Tales to child behavior and parent-child interactions at
home.
The
designs and instruments are described in more detail in the descriptions of
each of the studies that follows.
Dragon Tales had a broad-based impact on
the degree to which viewers demonstrated goal-oriented behavior and social
collaboration with peers. Appeal,
comprehension and attention levels were high.
In addition, it stimulated many adult-child conversations about key
program themes in the normal course of viewing at home. Highlights of the key findings from each of
the studies are presented here:
The Overall-Effects Study showed that Dragon Tales viewers demonstrated
significantly more positive change in goal orientation and social relationships
than children who watched the control program over the same period. These
differences were robust, being reflected across a variety of different kinds of
measures that included ratings by various groups of individuals with different
roles who saw the children in different settings.
·
According to ratings by parents, teachers and researchers, Dragon Tales viewers made statistically
significant gains, relative to the control group baseline, in how often they
"Choose challenging tasks," "Start or organize play with
others," "Share with other children," and "Cooperate with
others.”