Original studyFrontiers in Psychology, 2026Read the paper →
Lecture recordings, explainer clips, and AI-generated videos are now a routine part of university study. Yet researchers still debate whether watching beats reading, and what students should do after the first viewing. A new experiment suggests an animated video can teach a hard science topic better than plain text, while writing a summary may not help memory on its own.
A researcher at Pamukkale University in Turkey ran the experiment with 92 first-year students at a large public university in the American Midwest, during a research period hosted by Purdue University. The study is published in Frontiers in Psychology. Students were placed in one of four groups of 23, which combined two ways of learning with two ways of revising.
Half watched a five-minute animated film on how the immune system fights a bacterial infection, made by the German studio Kurzgesagt. The rest read a two-page, word-for-word transcript of its narration, about 1,186 words with no pictures. The video played once from start to finish, with no pausing or rewinding, and none of the students were studying biology.
After 10 minutes of study, each group spent another 10 minutes either restudying (watching or reading again) or writing a summary of the main ideas. Summarising is meant to help because learners must pick out key points in their own words, while restudying simply repeats the material. Everyone then took a 25-question multiple-choice test, and sat the same test again a week later.
Students who watched the video did better on both tests. Their average score straight after learning was 17.35 out of 25, against 15.07 for readers, and a week later it was 9.11 against 7.33. The gap was moderate to large and did not change reliably over the week.
Writing a summary gave no overall boost. After reading, summarisers forgot more over the week than those who reread, losing an average of 8.70 points against 6.78 and keeping only about 44% of their first score. After the video, both groups lost almost the same number of points, and scores fell sharply for everyone, from an average of 16.21 to 8.22.
The author suggests the animation helped because it showed cell processes that cannot be seen directly, while readers had to picture them. Summarising almost 1,200 words in 10 minutes with no training may have led students to copy terms rather than organise ideas, whereas those rereading met the full content twice. The summaries were not scored, so these explanations remain untested.
The study has clear limits. The summary effect was small, below the size the experiment could reliably detect, and rested on one group, while students were not individually randomised and sat the same test twice. Delayed scores in the text summary group were not far above the five points expected from guessing, and all participants came from one university, about 73% of them women, with a single topic and video.
The comparison was between a professionally made animation and a plain transcript without illustrations, so it does not show that video is better than text in general. Earlier reviews have found that video tends to help learning in higher education, and that the value of summarising depends on learners writing good summaries. For students facing a dense text, the findings suggest an unguided summary may do no better than rereading it.
