Studying Alone vs Studying with a Group
Mehar Jawad
Studying environment can vary from loud and crowded cafes to the peaceful effect of being home alone in your bedroom. A key variable in both environments are the people around you. Students and researchers have concluded from experiments that studying with a group of friends outside of school is not much different than studying at school since the location is the only change.
Benefits of Studying Independently:
Less Distractions: Chances of people asking you questions on how to do something, chatter in the background and socializing between friends are eliminated. There is a better ability to focus on the task and get it completed without interruptions of others. Doing active recall methods like flash cards may work better independently because you will not have people distracting you when recalling.
Working At Your Own Speed: You can have the luxury of taking your time with each activity and deciding your own breaks when you deserve it. Although in a group, it is harder to move ahead and there is a chance you will be restricted in terms of your personal progress.
Your Perfect Environment: It is an opportunity to completely customize your workspace by placing candles, scents, shelves or even sticking papers to the walls. With a group, there is the hassle of everybody agreeing to one place that is convenient by distance, locations, crowd etc. By yourself, you get to take up as much space as you desire to spread out your books and pens for the full study mode takeover. Some students study more comfortably with different sounds like white nose, marine animals, Lofi music and even silence.
Benefits of Studying with a Group:
Peer Pressure: The presence of others studying with you may make you productive because you are expected to be working as well as them. If someone is distracted and others are not, then pressure from others working hard around them can formulate guilt due to being intimidated by the productivity around them.
On Demand Help: With classmates already available around you in the study group, making use of them when stuck on a problem or misunderstanding a concept can be extremely beneficial for everyone. The student teaching can practice retention of the knowledge and the feynman technique (teaching others) meanwhile the student learning can actually understand a student version of the information and always ask follow up questions to be more clear.
More inspiration: Increase of opportunities in observing how people study their own ways and their routines are like food remedies or choice of study methods. It can boost creativity and allow people to explore new and unique ways of learning or studying in search of finding their ultimate study method most suitable to them. For example, visual learners may seek how colorful other students design the page of their textbook with headings, highlighters and unordinary diagrams (like mind maps and flowcharts).
To sum up, it truly comes down to the type of learner that you are. To understand this, students who need more attention from teachers to fully grasp a concept or may take longer when doing their work may be more efficient in a independent space (alone) whereas a student who is stronger in multi-tasking, collaborating with other people yet doing their own load of work may be more efficient studying in a group.
