The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,46

to associate the name of the letter with its appearance, then they learned the sequence of letters.” An adult considers constant repetition boring, because it requires reliving the same experience over and again. But to preschoolers repetition isn’t boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way. At CTW, the idea of learning through repetition was called the James Earl Jones effect.

Blue’s Clues is essentially a show built around the James Earl Jones effect. Instead of running new episodes one after another, and then repeating them as reruns later in the seasons—like every other television show—Nickelodeon runs the same Blue’s Clues episode for five straight days, Monday through Friday, before going on to the next one. As you can imagine, this wasn’t an idea that came easily to Nickelodeon. Santomero and Anderson had to convince them. (It also helped that Nickelodeon didn’t have the money to produce a full season of Blue’s Clues shows.) “I had the pilot in my house, and at the time my daughter was three and a half and she kept watching it over and over again,” Anderson says. “I kept track. She watched it fourteen times without any lagging of enthusiasm.” When the pilot was taken out into the field for testing, the same thing happened. They showed it five days in a row to a large group of preschoolers, and attention and comprehension actually increased over the course of the week—with the exception of the oldest children, the five year olds, whose attention fell off at the very end. Like the kids watching James Earl Jones, the children responded to the show in a different way with each repeat viewing, becoming more animated and answering more of Steve’s questions earlier and earlier. “If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don’t understand—things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it’s a search for understanding and predictability,” says Anderson. “For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self worth. And Blue’s Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve.”

Of course, kids don’t always like repetition. Whatever they are watching has to be complex enough to allow, upon repeated exposure, for deeper and deeper levels of comprehension. At the same time, it can’t be so complex that the first time around it baffles the children and turns them off. In order to strike this balance, Blue’s Clues engages in much of the same kind of research as Sesame Street—but at a far more intense level. Where Sesame Street tests a given show only once—and after it’s completed—Blue’s Clues tests shows three times before they go on the air. And while Sesame Street will typically only test a third of its episodes, Blue’s Clues tests them all.

I accompanied the Blue’s Clues research team on one of their weekly excursions to talk to preschoolers. They were led by Alice Wilder, director of research for the show, a lively dark haired woman who had just finished her doctorate in education at Columbia University. With her were two others, both women in their early twenties—Alison Gilman and Allison Sherman. On the morning that I joined them they were testing a proposed script at a preschool in Greenwich Village.

The script being tested was about animal behavior. It was, essentially, a first draft, laid out in a picture book that roughly corresponded to the way the actual episode would unfold, scene by scene, on television. The Blue’s Clues tester played the part of Steve, and walked the kids through the script, making a careful note of all the questions they answered correctly and those that seemed to baffle them. At one point, for example, Sherman sat down with a towheaded five year old named Walker and a four and a half year old named Anna in a purple and white checked skirt. She began reading from the script. Blue had a favorite animal. Would they help us find out what it was? The kids were watching her closely. She began going through some of the subsidiary puzzles,