Although video-based flipped learning is a widely accepted pedagogical strategy, few attempts have been made to explore the design and integration of pre-class instructional videos into in-class activities to improve the effectiveness of flipped classrooms. This study investigated whether question-embedded pre-class videos, together with the opportunity to review these questions at the beginning of in-class sessions, affected student learning processes and outcomes. Seventy university students from two naturally constituted classes participated in the quasi-experimental study. The experiment adopted a pre-test/post-test, between-subjects design and lasted for six weeks, with the same instructional content for the experimental and control groups. Students' age, sex, pre-experiment motivation, prior knowledge, and perceived knowledge were controlled for in the study. The results indicate that the educational intervention significantly strengthened learning performance, likely due to the increased regularity of engagement with pre-class materials. The intervention did not influence student satisfaction with the pre-class videos or the video viewing duration. Overall, the findings suggest that instructors should consider embedding questions in pre-class videos and reviewing them at the beginning of in-class sessions to facilitate student learning in video-based flipped classrooms.