Use the ‘Jigsaw Method’ to Make Studying in Groups More Effective
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Studying alone and in a quiet space is the way to go most of the time, but there are cases where studying with someone else is unavoidable, like when you’re assigned a group project. I hate group projects myself, but I admit that it can be nice to spread out the work over a more overwhelming workload. In fact, there are Times when studying together can be even more beneficial than studying alone, as long as you do it right. For example, dividing work among members of a group can help you process a huge amount of text and new information. This is called the puzzle method.
What is the puzzle reading method?
The jigsaw reading method is a way to break up large amounts of text and make it easier to understand. This idea was actually conceptualized in the 1970s, when social psychologist Elliot Aronson was seeking to combat racial bias among elementary school children in a classroom where the students had recently been integrated. He figured out how to make the environment less competitive and more cooperative between groups of children.
It was originally used for young children, but according to the guidance of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, it is suitable for learners of all ages. It is designed to turn individuals into experts on unique topics, then empower them to help their peers better understand those topics.
Similar to the practice of Think, Pair, Share, this method requires you to master a specific part of the content block and then bring everyone up to speed. This is useful when someone in a group is shy, when the volume of material is huge, or when you have a ton of other tasks due at the same time.
What do you think of it so far?
How Puzzle Learning Works
There are actually two ways to do puzzle learning:
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If you have a small group of people to work with, divide the reading into one- or two-paragraph chunks and assign one to each. Each person reads their assigned piece and works on it until they know it perfectly, then everyone takes turns teaching the group their mini topic. At the end of the discussion, everyone in the group should understand everything that was discussed in the text, but they did not have to read everything.
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If you are working with a larger group of people, smaller groups can tackle individual pieces of text. In a classroom, once a small group has mastered a concept, a learner goes and sits with another group and learns their concept from them and the cycle continues until everyone has had an opportunity to learn from the other groups. In an academic or professional environment, this can be done more easily and usefully with a collaborative document: each group can summarize their reading in a Google Doc or something similar, ultimately creating a cheat sheet that condenses the full text into a few paragraphs.
Some ideas: If you are asked to read and understand a piece of text on your own, use a guided reading technique like KWL or SQ3R to work through it. With these, you write down what you think you know before you start reading, as well as what you want to learn, which guides you to read carefully and find the answers. You can use the questions and answers you’ve written down to guide your discussion when the time comes, making it all quite smooth.
If you are working on a group project at school or work or are friendly enough with colleagues or classmates to suggest studying together, you can play with different methods here, as long as the main practice is to divide the work and give everyone something to become an expert on. It works like the Feynman method from there: whoever becomes the expert in a given topic is responsible for understanding it, then distilling it until it’s possible for everyone to understand it easily, which means that person must Really get it first. Everyone benefits from a simple explanation of a complex topic, and ultimately everyone learns the main messages of the text, both by teaching it to group members and by having them teach it.
