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Sesame Street research concerns the children's television show Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969. Unlike earlier children's programming, producers used research and more than 1,000 studies and experiments to create the show and test its impact on its young viewers' learning. By the end of the program's first season, the organization founded to oversee Sesame Street production, Children's Television Workshop (CTW), had developed what came to be called the "CTW model": a system of planning, production, and evaluation that combined the expertise of researchers and early childhood educators with that of the program's writers, producers, and directors. CTW utilized independent summative evaluations conducted by the Educational Testing Service during the show's first two seasons to measure the program's educational effectiveness. Based on these findings, the researchers compiled a body of data and the producers changed the show accordingly. The formative research on Sesame Street was the first time children's television viewing was studied scientifically. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

William Rounseville Alger

... that William Rounseville Alger's (pictured) 1857 Fourth of July speech was so controversial that the city of Boston refused to print it for seven years?
... that Herrscher des Himmels, erhöre das Lallen, a Bach cantata for the Third Day of Christmas, contains the only aria that he newly composed for the oratorio?
... that in 1874, thousands of Russian students "[went] to the people" in order to agitate the peasantry towards socialism?
... that Maine state legislator Tracy Quint introduced a bill that would have banned all COVID-19 vaccination mandates in Maine until 2024?
... that the bridge from which James Bond leapt in No Time to Die is actually an aqueduct?
... that a 1939 thesis by Nathaniel Fadipe, The Sociology of the Yoruba, was the first sociological study by a black African?
... that despite the support of the British authorities, the multi-racial United Tanganyika Party was unsuccessful, with the African-nationalist TANU winning a majority in the 1958–59 election?
... that the original author of Half-Life: Full Life Consequences wanted it to be so bad that "it stands the test of time as one of the worst things ever written"?

In the news

Desmond Tutu

South African archbishop and human rights activist Desmond Tutu (pictured) dies at the age of 90.
Ariane flight VA256, carrying the James Webb Space Telescope, is launched from the Guiana Space Centre.
A ferry fire in Bangladesh kills at least 40 people.
Floods in Malaysia leave at least 46 people dead and displace more than 68,000 others.
At least 85 people are killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Madagascar.

On this day

December 27

Propaganda poster of a kulak being hit by a giant fist

1521 – A period of unrest in Wittenberg, Saxony, following the arrival of the Zwickau prophets, was quelled after the release of Martin Luther from custody.
1845 – John L. O'Sullivan, in his newspaper the New York Morning News, argued that the United States had the right to claim the entire Oregon Country "by the right of our manifest destiny", popularizing the term's use.
1904 – The stage play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, by Scottish author and dramatist J. M. Barrie, premiered in London.
1929 – Joseph Stalin announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class", beginning a period of political repression against prosperous peasants (poster pictured).
2007 – Riots erupted in Mombasa, Kenya, after Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of the presidential election—the first event in a political, economic, and humanitarian crisis.

Anne de Mortimer (b. 1388)
Ghalib (b. 1797)
Amy Vanderbilt (d. 1974)

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From today's featured list

Rainbow jersey

The men's individual time trial event at the UCI Road World Championships is the men's world championship for the road bicycle racing discipline of time trial. Introduced in 1994 by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the world's governing body of cycling, the event consists of a time trial covering a distance of approximately 45 kilometres (28 mi) over flat or rolling terrain. Riders start separated by two-minute intervals; the one that completes the course in the shortest time is the winner, and is entitled to wear the rainbow jersey (pictured) in time trial events for the forthcoming season. Switzerland's Fabian Cancellara (2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010) and Germany's Tony Martin (2011, 2012, 2013 and 2016) have won the most competitions with four each. Australia's Michael Rogers (2003, 2004 and 2005) comes in next in terms of victories, with three wins; Rogers and Martin are the only people to take 3 wins in successive years. The current male champion is Italian rider Filippo Ganna, who won the 2021 event. (Full list...)

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The south-western black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis occidentalis) is a subspecies of the black rhinoceros found primarily in Namibia. The chief threat it faces is from illegal poaching for its valuable horn. It is listed as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The total population is increasing, and numbered 1,920 animals in 2010. This female south-western black rhinoceros was photographed in Etosha National Park, Namibia.

Photograph credit: Charles James Sharp

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