SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Educational Psychology

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1427609

Facilitating or hindering learning -a meta-analysis of acceleration on video learning

Provisionally accepted
Guan  HuangGuan Huang*Yixuan  DuYixuan DuHairu  YangHairu Yang
  • China West Normal University, Nanchong, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

For full guidelines please refer to Author Guidelines Time compression of instructional videos has received attention from scholars around the world. From existing empirical studies, a wide range of scholars have not yet reached a consensus on whether acceleration promotes video learning. The article adopts a meta-analytic approach to analyze 12 domestic and international experimental and quasi-experimental research papers, exploring the role of moderating variables on the effect of acceleration on learning from the dimensions of teachers' appearances, subtitles, and subject attributes. The results of the study showed that the main effect test results found that accelerated playback of instructional videos increased learners' cognitive load (g=0.59) and decreased maintenance test scores (g=-0.41), migration test scores (g=-0.50), and learning satisfaction (g=-0.24). Moderation analyses revealed that teacher appearances played a moderating role in accelerating the effects of cognitive load and maintenance tests, and subtitles, country, and subject attributes played a moderating role in accelerating the effects of learning satisfaction. Therefore, instructional video designers need to proactively consider the appropriate speed when developing instructional videos, and learners need to reasonably adjust the playback speed of the videos when learning from them in order to improve the quality of video teaching and learning. For educators, when designing teaching videos, they need to fully consider the impact of publication bias on the existing research results, and avoid blindly referring to the conclusions that may overestimate the effects of acceleration.

Keywords: Speed of speech1, Video learning2, multimedia learning3, meta-analysis4, Playback speed5

Received: 04 May 2024; Accepted: 11 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Huang, Du and Yang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Guan Huang, China West Normal University, Nanchong, China

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