Effects of Viewing the Television Program Between the Lions on the Emergent Literacy Skills of Young Children Deborah L. Linebarger University of Pennsylvania Anjelika Z. Kosanic, Charles R. Greenwood, and Nii Sai Doku University of Kansas Does viewing Between the Lions, an educational television series featuring literacy instruction, improve the emergent literacy skills of kindergarten and first-grade children? Do improvements vary as a function of the child’s initial reading risk status? In this study, higher word recognition and standardized reading test scores were noted for all viewers compared with nonviewers. In addition, significantly higher means and accelerated slopes for phonemic awareness and letter–sound tasks were found for viewers compared with nonviewers. Even so, improvements in literacy skills (i.e., speech to print, word building, concepts of print) varied, mostly favoring moderately at-risk to not-at-risk kindergarten children who viewed the program. Kindergarten children at great risk and first graders did not benefit as much from the program. One of the most compelling findings from recent evaluations of reading research is that children who have an inadequate start in reading rarely catch up (National Reading Panel, 2000; National Research Council, 1998). For example, in Juel (1988), 88% of children identified as poor readers at the end of first grade were still identified as poor readers at the end of the fourth grade. Reading trajectories are established early and are difficult to change. Johnson and Allington (1991) observed that “remedial reading is generally not very effective in making children more literate” (p. 1001). Therefore, eliminating the need for remedial reading in the first place may be the most sensible alternative. Finding ways that all children can bolster their early literacy experiences, sustain those gains, and become successful, fluent readers is an important challenge that demands attention. Whitehurst and Lonigan (1998, 2001) proposed that adequate early reading instruction includes opportunities for children to acquire knowledge of two interdependent domains of information. First, children need sources of information that directly support their understanding of the meaning of print (i.e., outside-in pro- cesses: vocabulary knowledge, conceptual knowledge, story sche- mas, comprehension). Children also need to be able to translate print into sounds and sounds into print (i.e., inside-out: phonemic awareness, letter–sound correspondence). Recent intervention re- search designed to provide young children with the necessary early literacy skills to succeed in school has reported that changes in preschool emergent literacy environments (see, e.g., Neuman & Roskos, 1997) and teacher-directed (see, e.g., O’Connor, 2000; O’Connor, Jenkins, & Slocum, 1995), parent-led (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998), and peer-mediated strategies (Mathes, Howard, Allen, & Fuchs, 1998) help children acquire these skills. However, the ability to widely implement such programs will be difficult and costly, and, as a result, the scale of impact on the nation’s popu- lation of young children learning to read may be slow and small. Building on their success teaching preschoolers school readiness skills via television (i.e., Sesame Street), the producers of a new television program for young children, in collaboration with lead- ing reading experts, created a program that incorporated both outside-in and inside-out emergent literacy processes (Strickland & Rath, 2000). Their goal was to reach all segments of society, especially children who might have little or no access to print resources or few informal literacy opportunities in their homes. The pervasiveness of television (e.g., over 99% of U.S. homes have a television set; Statistical Abstracts, 2000) offers a powerful way to address the literacy needs of children who have “low redundancy of educational opportunity” (Mielke, 1994, p. 126). Models of Learning From Television The process of acquiring new information from television is complex, involving attention to and subsequent comprehension of program stimuli. When children interact with television, they integrate the various stimuli into meaningful, comprehensible bits of information by attending to important or interesting aspects of Deborah L. Linebarger, Annenberg School for Communication, Univer- sity of Pennsylvania; Anjelika Z. Kosanic, Charles R. Greenwood, and Nii Sai Doku, Juniper Gardens Children’s Project, University of Kansas. Portions of the research were presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 2001. Funding for this research was provided by WGBH Educational Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts. We thank Rhett Larsen, Patty Eskrootchi, and Denise Chowning, who collected the data for this project. We are especially thankful to Beth Kirsch, Linda K. Rath, other WGBH Boston staff, and Sirius Thinking, Ltd., staff, who provided valuable assistance and feedback in the comple- tion of this project. Thanks are also extended to those schools, families, and children from the greater Kansas City metropolitan area who kindly vol- unteered to participate in this study. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Deborah L. Linebarger, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Penn- sylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. E-mail: dlinebarger@asc.upenn.edu Journal of Educational Psychology Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association 2004, Vol. 96, No. 2, 297–308 0022-0663/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-0663.96.2.297 297