BOSTON (AP) – Sheldon H. White, whose studies of how children learn influenced government education policy and children’s television programming, has died, Harvard University announced Saturday.

White, 76, a faculty member at Harvard for four decades, died at a Boston hospital on Thursday of heart failure, the university said.

He gained national prominence in the 1960s for his studies of learning and cognitive development in young children, contributing to initiatives for children including the federal Head Start program and the Children’s Television Workshop. He also chaired a Head Start research advisory panel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the early 1990s. His friend and colleague at Harvard, psychology professor Brendan Maher, said White believed that research ought to have a practical use, and spent his career turning study findings into educational policy and practice.

“He was always very interested in translating or helping move various findings in the lab into forms that would actually influence day-to-day teaching in the classroom,” Maher said.

White chaired a congressional advisory panel on “Schools, Kids and Measurement: Technologies of Assessment” and served on an advisory panel for the Head Start Evaluation Design Project. He was also a member of the Boston Museum of Science Corporation from 1977 to 1985 and designed its children’s discovery room.

Between 1968 and 1970 White worked with the Children’s Television Workshop, at the time that organization developed “Sesame Street.”

White also served as a consultant to the Educational Testing Service, based in Princeton, N.J.

“We are greatly saddened to learn of professor White’s passing,” said William C. Kirby, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard. “His work in children’s learning itself helped the feed of developmental psychology to grow. His role in shaping the highest-quality, most efficacious programs for children’s education affected the lives of countless young people.”

Maher said White was also concerned about how children learn ethical standards and interpersonal behavior, and believed schools had a role to play in teaching those things.

“He wanted to convince people that concern with ethics ought to be a concern in the schoolroom,” Maher said. “When educators said that was not their job, he wanted to make the point that it was their job.”

White was also committed to his field, Maher added.

“He was very engaged in what he was doing in the sense he was doing it because he was convinced that it was worth doing, not just that the things he was doing would make a good career,” Maher said.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., White graduated from Harvard in 1951 and earned a masters from Boston University a year later. After serving as a research assistant at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, he earned his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1957 and taught at the University of Chicago from 1957 to 1965.

White joined the Harvard faculty as an associate professor of education and cognitive psychology in the Graduate School of Education in 1965, and was named professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1973. He chaired the department of psychology from 1984-87 and as acting chair from 1989-99. He retired in 2001.

A longtime resident of Newton, White is survived by his wife Barbara; a brother, Aaron, of Framingham, two sons and three grandchildren.

AP-ES-03-19-05 1825EST