Recognizing that some of the lessons educational television teaches children are cultural--how to be members of their own cultural group, for example, or what other cultural groups are like--a study developed qualitative methods for the formative evaluation of the accuracy of an educational television program's cultural content with respect to the culture of the group being portrayed. The study included individual and group interviews of a representative sample of Chicanos from San Jose, California on their reactions to "Villa Alegre," a program aimed at Hispanic elementary school students. Questioned on how similar the taped situations were to their own experience, the informants indicated that while the situations presented seemed realistic--one segment, for example, involved a student who had hit his friend--the adult characters' reactions to the incidents were not realistic. Besides remarking discrepancies in use of language on the television program and in "real life," informants offered an abundance of unsolicited but potentially useful cultural information. The document suggests that future research needs to identify the significant variables defining a target culture, and suggest methods of using these variables in selecting cultural informants. Furthermore, as informants tend to report on the culture as it should be rather than as it is, questioning techniques to distinguish fact from value must be refined. (MM)