Study with friends, the way that works
Studying with friends can be the best session of your week, or two hours of chatting with a book open. Research says the difference is not the friends. It's how you study together.
What groups do well
- Explaining makes you understand. In one experiment (Nestojko and colleagues, 2014), students who were told they would have to teach a text to someone else remembered it better, and more organised, than students who expected a normal test. Preparing to explain forces you to sort the ideas in your head.
- Discussing a hard question builds understanding. In a study published in Science (Smith and colleagues, 2009), university students answered a question, discussed it with their neighbours, then answered a new, similar question alone. They did better on the new one, even in groups where nobody had the right answer at first. Talking it through, not copying, made the difference.
- The big picture. A review of dozens of studies in science, maths and engineering (Springer and colleagues, 1999) found that learning in small groups was linked to better results, more students sticking with their studies, and better attitudes toward the subject.
Where groups go wrong
Trying to remember together can backfire. When people recall as a group, they often remember less than the same people would on their own: other people's ideas cut into your own way of remembering. Psychologists call it collaborative inhibition (Weldon & Bellinger, 1997).
Two other traps: one person does everything while the others watch (watching someone solve feels like learning, like re-reading does), and the session slowly turns into chatting.
A group session that works (about an hour)
- Prepare alone first: each person reads their part and writes a few questions.
- Take turns making the questions: one person asks 3 to 5 questions on a topic.
- Everyone answers alone, in silence, on paper. Phones away.
- Then compare and discuss. Every disagreement is a chance: whoever got it right explains why, in their own words.
- Each person writes their own mistakes down, to review tomorrow. Then swap roles.
One rule above all: nobody is judged for a wrong answer. A group where people are afraid to be wrong stops trying, and trying is where the learning happens.
Try it tonight
Ask one friend: tomorrow, each of you writes 3 questions on today's topic. Swap, answer alone, then explain your answers to each other. Twenty minutes.
MajorMind does this for you: study rooms with question rounds: one of you makes the questions, everyone answers alone, the room only sees "2 of 3 got it" (never who was wrong), and each mistake goes to your own notebook. Free.
Join the betaSources
- Nestojko, J. F., Bui, D. C., Kornell, N., & Bjork, E. L. (2014). Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages. Memory & Cognition, 42(7), 1038–1048.
- Smith, M. K., Wood, W. B., Adams, W. K., Wieman, C., Knight, J. K., Guild, N., & Su, T. T. (2009). Why peer discussion improves student performance on in-class concept questions. Science, 323(5910), 122–124.
- Springer, L., Stanne, M. E., & Donovan, S. S. (1999). Effects of small-group learning on undergraduates in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 69(1), 21–51.
- Weldon, M. S., & Bellinger, K. D. (1997). Collective memory: Collaborative and individual processes in remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(5), 1160–1175.