Abstract
Objective: To analyze scientific studies that evaluated the academic performance of students who used videos as a tool for learning basic sciences (anatomy, histology, physiology, etc.) in the undergraduate medical course. Methods: A review of the literature was carried out at the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME), and studies indexed therein were included. Data from included studies were entered into a spreadsheet and treated by descriptive statistics. Results: The total search resulted in 962 articles, which after reading the titles and abstracts, culminated in 20 studies. Of these, ten were excluded because they did not apply the intervention of interest, did not clarify the inclusion, or did not present separate data from medical students. Academic performance was greater for the group exposed to video in six studies, while three studies showed similar results among students exposed to video and control, and in only one study the academic performance of students exposed to video was lower. Conclusion: The use of videos as a teaching tool is increasing, despite this, this research shows that the literature on the subject related to medical education is scarce representing an opportunity for the development of new research.