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

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.