Based on peer-reviewed research published in Smart Learning Environments, November 2025
If part of your job is getting people to understand something they'd rather not sit through (a compliance update, a new process, a policy change, how the numbers work) you already know the problem. It's not that your content is wrong. It's that nobody retains it.
A new peer-reviewed study puts some hard numbers behind something we've long known: the format you choose changes how much people actually learn, and whiteboard animation comes out on top. Not by a little, and not just on first impressions.
In this article:
What the researchers did
Mark Brosnan and Tim Hasso of Bond University ran a controlled experiment with 521 adults, teaching them introductory accounting concepts, deliberately chosen as the kind of dry, technical material people tend to switch off from. (Sound familiar, anyone who's ever had to explain depreciation, data protection, or a new expenses process to a room of non-specialists?)
Every participant got exactly the same information, but in one of five formats:
- Whiteboard animation with narration
- A narrated slideshow
- Audio only
- Text only
- No instruction at all (a true control group, a first for research in this area)
Participants were then tested on what they'd learned, both immediately and again one week later, with no access to the materials in between.
What they found
Three findings stand out for anyone who creates training, onboarding or explainer content for a living.
1. People enjoyed the whiteboard animation more, and enjoyment isn't fluff. The whiteboard group rated the lessons significantly higher on enjoyment and engagement than every other format. That matters because the results support a well-established idea in learning science: when people enjoy and engage with material, they encode more of it. Engagement is the mechanism, not a nice-to-have.
2. They scored higher on the test. Same information, same narration script. The only difference was watching the content being drawn.
| Format | Average retention score (out of 5) |
|---|---|
| Whiteboard animation | 3.8 |
| Text only | 3.4 |
| Audio only | 3.4 |
| Narrated slideshow | 3.3 |
3. The advantage was still there a week later. This is the study's most novel contribution. Most multimedia learning research tests people immediately and stops. Brosnan and Hasso invited everyone back seven days later, and the whiteboard group was still ahead. Everyone forgot at the same rate, but because the whiteboard group learned more in the first place, they retained more.
Why does drawing work?
The researchers point to two mechanisms.
Cognitive load. Whiteboard animation reveals information progressively, in sync with the narration, so the visuals guide attention rather than overwhelming it, unlike a dense slide that arrives all at once.
Social agency. The visible drawing hand acts as a human cue. Watching someone draw an explanation feels like being taught by a person, and prior research shows learners respond to that humanizing effect.
The study also addressed the obvious objection: that whiteboard animation only works because it's a novelty. Between earlier studies in 2016 and today, whiteboard video has become far more common, yet the effect keeps showing up. Other researchers have tested and rejected the novelty explanation directly.
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The takeaway: this isn't a gimmick that wears off. It's a format that works because of how it's built. Sequenced reveals, synchronized narration, a human hand telling a visual story.
What this means if you're the one doing the explaining
The participants in this study weren't students in a lecture hall. They were working-age adults (average age 31) learning technical business concepts online, in short three-minute videos, which is a pretty good description of how modern workplace learning actually happens. That makes the findings directly relevant if you're:
- An L&D or HR team trying to make onboarding and compliance training stick, not just tick a box
- An internal comms lead explaining a change people need to genuinely understand, not just skim
- A public sector or healthcare team communicating processes where misunderstanding has real consequences
- An SMB explaining a product or service that's more complicated than a static graphic can carry
The practical takeaway from the researchers themselves: whiteboard animation is a cost-effective default when rapid comprehension and retention are the priorities. And modern software has removed the production barrier that once kept this format locked away in animation studios. (We'll take that as a compliment: VideoScribe is one of the tools the paper credits with making whiteboard animation accessible to non-animators.)
The bigger point
There's a lot of noise right now about how fast you can generate a video. This study is a useful reminder that speed of production isn't the metric that matters; what your audience walks away remembering is. A video that takes minutes to make but seconds to forget hasn't saved anyone time.
Whiteboard animation earns its results through craft: the progressive reveal, the synchronized story, the hand that makes an explanation feel human. Those are exactly the things you control when you build a scribe, and now there's fresh, peer-reviewed evidence that they pay off where it counts.
Ready to put the research into practice? Start a free 7-day trial and create your first scribe today.
Source: Brosnan, M. & Hasso, T. (2025). The effect of using whiteboard animation in teaching introductory accounting concepts. Smart Learning Environments, 12(65). Read the open-access paper.
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