The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,37

difference. It means if you want to know whether—and what—kids are learning from a TV show, all you have to do is to notice what they are watching. And if you want to know what kids aren’t learning, all you have to do is notice what they aren’t watching. Preschoolers are so sophisticated in their viewing behavior that you can determine the stickiness of children’s programming by simple observation.

The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children’s Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children’s TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic advisers was actually reaching the show’s viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season.

Palmer’s innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second by second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers’ attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine.

“We’d take that big sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. “We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we’d connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we’d say whoa, what’s going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we’d say, wow, that segment’s really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We’d have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they’d go back to the drawing board.”

Palmer tested other children’s shows, like the Tom and Jerry cartoons, or Captain Kangaroo, and compared what sections of those shows worked with what sections of Sesame Street worked. Whatever Palmer learned, he fed back to the show’s producers and writers, so they could fine tune the material accordingly. One of the standard myths about children’s television, for example, had always been that kids love to watch animals. “The producers would bring in a cat or an anteater or an otter and show it and let it cavort around,” Palmer says. “They thought that would be interesting. But our Distracter showed that it was a bomb every time.” A huge effort went into a Sesame Street character called the Man from Alphabet, whose specialty was puns. Palmer showed that kids hated him. He was canned. The Distracter showed that no single segment of the Sesame Street format should go beyond four minutes, and that three minutes was probably optimal. He forced the producers to simplify dialogue and abandon certain techniques they had taken from adult television. “We found to our surprise that our preschool audience didn’t like it when the adult cast got into a contentious discussion,” he remembers. “They