Video and interactive games are effective in teaching disadvantaged preschoolers the literacy skills they need for kindergarten, according to a large-scale evaluation financed by the U.S. Department of Education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The randomized controlled study looks at a technology-supported literacy curriculum that involved video from “Super Why!,” “Sesame Street,” and “Between the Lions,” programs that are produced by PBS as part of the Education Department’s Ready to Learn Initiative. The study also included online games produced by the programs' producers, which targeted some of the same literacy skills as the shows themselves.

Researchers found that the 398 low-income children picked to participate from 47 preschool centers in New York City and San Francisco on average made significant gains in acquiring skills such as naming letters, knowing the sounds associated with those letters, and understanding concepts about stories and printed words.

The study compared those children’s performance in those areas with that of preschoolers participating in a technology-supported science curriculum. Children participating in the study ­— either in the literacy or in the science curriculum — each received 25 hours of activities over 10 weeks.

“What’s really powerful here is the combination of media, digital content, and professional development,” said Bill Penuel, the director of evaluation research for SRI International, a research organization based in Menlo Park, Calif., that conducted the study along with the Boston-based Education Development Center Inc. “Particularly when you put these things together, preschool teachers can implement something that is powerful, and it can have effects that help to close the gap between low-income students for school readiness, compared with more advantaged students of this age group.”