Characters’ realism, not familiarity, improved Chinese children’s learning from video

ABSTRACT

Characters in educational videos have been shown to help children learn and transfer knowledge. The aim of this study is to explore the influence of realism and familiarity of characters on children’s video learning. The participants were 90 4- to 6-year-olds. The children watched a video in which a character demonstrated how to construct simple gears, and then completed the same task to test the effect of the character’s realism and familiarity on their learning and transfer of STEM knowledge. A 2 (high-reality vs. low-reality) × 2 (familiar, unfamiliar) experiment was adopted. The results showed that children learned STEM material better from live-action human characters than from animated animal characters. However, the familiarity of the character did not influence children’s learning, and the parasocial relationship between children and the character also did not improve learning. The findings suggest that the realism of the characters, not their familiarity, is key in helping children learn from educational videos.

IMPACT SUMMARY

Prior State of Knowledge: Children’s learning from screen-based educational media can be influenced by characteristics of the characters. Less is known about whether realistic and familiar characteristics improve children’s screen learning.

Novel Contributions: We created four characters based on combined realism and familiarity to explore whether some characters are better than others at promoting learning STEM information.

Practical Implications: Our findings are relevant to producers of educational videos. Compared to animated characters, live-action human characters may better help children ages 4 to 6 years to learn from these videos.

KEYWORDS:

• Realism
• familiarity
• character
• children
• video learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2023.2227290.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant (#62277025) to Fuxing Wang

Notes on contributors

Xinyun Cao

Xinyun Cao is a graduate student at the School of Psychology at Central China Normal University. She studies how children learn through media characters, intelligent digital agents and video chat.

Fuxing Wang

Fuxing Wang is a Professor at the School of Psychology at Central China Normal University. He studies multimedia learning, digital media and children’s learning.

Hui Li

Hui Li is an Associate Professor at the School of Education at Central China Normal University. She studies the effects of reality and fantasy in videos on children’s development, and the effects of video characters on children’s learning.

Yu Tong

Yu Tong is a doctoral student at School of Psychology at Central China Normal University. Her current research investigates how children think about information sources, including individuals, the internet and emerging technologies.