Educational television
Television programming designed to support learning and intellectual development, through instruction, explanation, or educational storytelling.
Instructional television: Television programming created to teach defined skills or subject matter through planned instruction. Its lessons make educational aims explicit through sequenced explanations and practice.
Sesame Street: An American children’s television series combining puppetry, animation, music, and lessons in literacy and numeracy. Its research-informed format became a defining model for preschool educational television.
John Amos Comenius: A seventeenth-century Czech educator who advocated universal education and learning through images. His emphasis on visual teaching anticipates a central affordance of television.
Distance education: Education delivered when teachers and learners are separated by location, often through communication technologies. Television can distribute lessons to learners beyond a classroom’s reach.
Sesame Street effect: The association between childhood viewing of Sesame Street and improved school readiness, especially among disadvantaged children. Studies of this effect made the program a prominent case in educational media research.
Educational entertainment: Media that combine entertainment with intentional learning goals. It uses narrative, humor, and characters to hold attention while conveying ideas.
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: An American children’s television series in which Fred Rogers addressed children’s emotions and everyday experiences. Its quiet conversations demonstrate education through social and emotional development.
Educational broadcasting: The use of broadcast media to provide instruction and educational programming to the public. Television developed within a broader effort to make broadcast media serve education.
Open University: A British public university founded in 1969 to widen access to higher education, including through broadcast teaching. Its courses integrated television broadcasts into a structured university curriculum.
Children and television: The study of how television viewing relates to children’s development, behavior, and learning. Educational programming’s outcomes depend partly on children’s age and viewing habits.