The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,39

female Muppet, approaches the word HUG in the center of the screen. She stands behind the H, sounding it out carefully, then moves to the U, and then the G. She does it again, moving from left to right, pronouncing each letter separately, before putting the sounds together to say “hug.” As she does, the Muppet Herry Monster enters and repeats the word as well. The segment ends with the Herry Monster hugging the delighted little girl Muppet.

In another segment, called “Oscar’s Blending,” Oscar the Grouch and the Muppet Crummy play a game called “Breakable Words,” in which words are assembled and then taken apart. Oscar starts by calling for C, which pops up on the lower left corner of the screen. The letter C, Oscar tells Crummy, is pronounced “cuh.” Then the letters at pop up in the lower right hand corner and Crummy sounds the letters out—“at.” The two go back and forth—Oscar saying “cuh” and Crummy “at”—each time faster and faster, until the sounds blend together to make cat. As this happens, the letters at the bottom of the screen move together as well to make “cat.” The two Muppets repeat “cat” a few times and then the word drops from sight, accompanied by a crashing sound. Then the process begins again with the word bat.

Both of these segments are entertaining. They hold children’s attention. On the Distracter, they score brilliantly. But do they actually teach the fundamentals of reading? That’s a much harder question. To answer it, the producers of Sesame Street in the mid 1970s called in a group of researchers at Harvard University led by a psychologist named Barbara Flagg who were expert in something called eye movement photography. Eye movement research is based on the idea that the human eye is capable of focusing on only a very small area at one time—what is called a perceptual span. When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and then four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time. We jump from one of these chunks to another, pausing—or fixating—on them long enough to make sense of each letter. The reason we can focus clearly on only that much text is that most of the sensors in our eyes—the receptors that process what we see—are clustered in a small region in the very middle of the retina called the fovea. That’s why we move our eyes when we read: we can’t pick up much information about the shape, or the color, or the structure of words unless we focus our fovea directly on them. Just try, for example, to reread this paragraph by staring straight ahead at the center of the page. It’s impossible.

If you can track where someone’s fovea is moving and what they are fixating on, in other words, you can tell with extraordinary precision what they are actually looking at and what kind of information they are actually receiving. The people who make television commercials, not surprisingly, are obsessed with eye tracking. If you make a beer commercial with a beautiful model, it would be really important to know whether the average twenty two year old male in your target audience fixates only on the model or eventually moves to your can of beer. Sesame Street went to Harvard in 1975 for the same reason. When kids watched “Oscar’s Blending” or “Hug,” were they watching and learning about the words, or were they simply watching the Muppets?

The experiment was conducted with twenty one four and five year olds, who were brought to the Harvard School of Education over the course of a week by their parents. One by one they were seated in an antique barber’s chair with a padded headrest about three feet away from a 17 inch color television monitor. A Gulf & Western infrared Eye View Monitor was set up just off to the left, carefully calibrated to track the fovea movements of each subject. What they found was that “Hug” was a resounding success. Seventy six percent of all fixations were on the letters. Better still, 83 percent of all preschoolers fixated on the letters in a left to right sequence—mimicking, in other words, the actual reading process. “Oscar’s Blending,” on the other hand, was a disaster. Only 35 percent of total fixations fell on the letters. And exactly zero percent of the preschoolers read the letters from left to right. What was the problem? First,