Index – Technical Science – Learning is more effective if you speed up the recorded performance

Watching lectures is becoming more and more a primary activity for college students, so the University of California staff conducted a survey on the video habits of higher education students. According to findings in Columns of Applied Cognitive Psychology, sprint videos are a common practice that, within certain limits, has neither a beneficial nor a detrimental effect on learning, but can be used to benefit from an appropriate strategy.

The surprisingly large majority of university students, 85 percent, said they watch lectures at an accelerated pace. 91 percent of them thought video learning was more useful when playing at normal speed or 1.5 times faster than 2 or 2.5 times. However, this opinion turned out to be wrong.

During the beta test, 231 students watched Youtube lectures at different speeds, and then completed the repeated exams a week later. The results clearly showed that the same results were achieved by those who watched the recording normally one and a half times or twice as fast. Only two and a half times the speed there was a deterioration in the results.

The conclusion is that students can halve the time they spend in lectures or watch twice during a regular lecture for more effective learning. According to the tests, the timing of the doubling does not matter, the winning strategy is to watch the video playing at the doubling speed again before the test (instead of twice in a row).

Since 76 percent of the people surveyed thought that first viewing the presentation at normal speed and repeating at double speed before testing was a viable strategy, the effectiveness of this method was also validated and found to be no better than consecutive two-speed presentations.

The point is that the efficiency will definitely increase until the acceleration exceeds twice the speed.

(British Psychological Association Research Summary)