dirtyDogStink

The Stickiness Factor...and your child

Monday, February 26 2007

No, I'm not talking about that errant piece of gum in the parking lot that always seems to end up on my shoe. Or the leftover snacks that always seem to surround your child's mouth for hours after the actual meal. I'm talking about The Stickiness Factor as described by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point.

I'm in the middle of the book right now, but Gladwell's discussion of The Stickiness Factor (chapter 3) revolves around two insanely popular children's shows, the iconic Sesame Street and new kid on the block Blue's Clues. As the father of a 3 year old, I found it particularly interesting from the perspective of how children learn.

First of all, let's make sure we're on the same page. The Stickiness Factor is just how well someone remembers an idea...how well it sticks.  Be it a salesman's pitch for a vacuum cleaner, an algorithm from a software engineering textbook or a TV commercial for Dove's Real Beauty campaign. When looking at small children (ages 2-7) the stickiness factor Gladwell refers to revolves around learning and the children's ability to retain what we're trying to teach them, via TV in these instances.

Here's what he discusses with regard to Sesame Street:

• Kids watch TV when they understand what's going on and look away when they are confused. This goes against the normal thinking of today that they watch when they are stimulated and look away when bored. Children do not just watch the flashes and loud noises on screen, but in fact, are less likely to watch a show if they cannot make sense of the story [page 101].
• Children are excellent multi-taskers! In one experiment, two groups of five-year-olds were shown an episode of Sesame Street. One group had toys in the room with them and the other did not. The kids that had toys in the room watched the show 47% of the time while the kids without toys watched 87% of the show. But when they tested the two groups to see how much the kids remembered, the scores were exactly the same [page 101]!
• Keep it simple! Research while creating Sesame Street led them to find that kids didn't like it when the adult cast got into contentious discussion or when more than one person was talking at once [a common tactic in adult television to hype scenes]. What adults see as exciting, young children see as confusing and tune it out [page 104].
• At the time Sesame Street was created (1969), it was commonly accepted by child psychologists that you should not mix fantasy and reality thinking that it would confuse children. Research for the initial episodes found that children lost all interest when the muppets were removed from certain scenes. Attention levels would immediately pop back up when the muppet characters re-entered scenes. The producers went against the psychologists' theories and mixed the two. That's when Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and Snuffleupagus were born [page 105]. Some of my favorites! :-)
• Eye movement photography. This is research based on the idea that the human eye is capable of taking in only a very small area at one time. People who make television commercials are obsessed with eye tracking so they can see exactly what part of their ad is attracting the viewer's attention. When applying this to Sesame Street, the producers were able to determine what parts of the segments were really attracting the attention of the children and adjust accordingly to get the maximum attention in the right spots. For instance, to get the kids looking at the letters and numbers on the screen instead of just the muppets [page 108].

After all that, what else could there be? Well, Blue's Clues applied the lessons from the well-deserved success of Sesame Street and added a few more of their own:

• Going back to the theory that children will watch what they understand, they don't like cleverness such as Sesame Street uses to also cater to adult viewers [at the time, stay-at-home mothers]. Kids just don't get the puns and plays on pop culture, in fact, those are times when they might even lose interest [page 112]. Blue's Clues presents stories in a perfectly literal way, without any word-play or comedy that will confuse pre-schoolers [page 121].
• Children have a longer attention span then they are given credit for, if the material is presented at an appropriate pace and format. It was assumed that children had short attention spans, but since the 1960s it has been shown that children simply need plots to be told in the narrative form, stories. Kids remember things by telling stories of what happened and that is one way they deal with the complicated things they encounter in their daily lives [page 118].
• Long pauses give kids an opportunity to interact. If you've watched Blue's Clues then you've seen how Joe and Steve ask questions of the viewer and then take very long pauses for responses. This is intentional as pre-schoolers take longer to process things and allows them an opportunity to participate [page 123]. A fairly obvious tactic once you've seen it in action.
• Toddlers and small children (2-6) enjoy repetitive stories. According to Gladwell, Blue's Clues runs the same episode every day for a week. Their research showed that children actually became more interested in the episode on the fourth and fifth day! One of the researchers discusses how a child's driving force is not a search for novelty [like with older kids], but a search for understanding and predictability [page 125]. I have seen this in my own daughter. She will fixate on one or two specific movies for a few weeks and only be interested in watching those, but eventually moves on to another one or two. Right now she's into Shrek (1 & 2), before that it was Toy Story (1 & 2) and before that was Monsters Inc. This weekend she might have made the switch to Madagascar. ;-)

I took the liberty of paraphrasing several portions of the chapter and noted the pages where appropriate.

My thoughts on this? Well, I just found it very interesting to see how they performed the research for the shows and the results. Everything my daughter does corroborates their findings as well. She loves Dora the Explorer , "Go, Diego, Go" and the Little Einsteins, which seem to use the same methodology as Blue's Clues [a 20 minute story at a slow pace with the characters taking long pauses after interacting with the viewers]. Not only does she love the shows, but she really does learn from them. One day about 6 months ago, completely out of the blue, she counted to 10 in Spanish! I know for a fact she learned that from Dora.

The explanation behind repetition was quite enlightening. Once I read the concept it was very easy to see why my daughter is so insistent on watching the same movie for a week or two. The more she watches it the more comfortable she becomes with the story and the characters which allows her to take in other aspects of the movie. Like building blocks.

If you're a parent of a toddler/pre-schooler then I highly recommend you read Gladwell's chapter on The Stickiness Factor from The Tipping Point. If you read just this chapter some of the discussion will be lost without context, but only around how The Stickiness Factor works inside the concept of tipping points. The child-related stuff seems to stand on its own. I extracted most of the highlights and concepts, but his explanations go in depth without getting you lost in the details.

~tod

tags: tipping+point, parenting, toddler