Studying alone or in a group: which one gets better results?

During the exam period, it is essential to be productive and to consolidate as best as possible the last concepts you need to master by D-Day. This is a period when you can tend to isolate yourself more by reducing outings with friends to devote all your energy to studying. But it raises an interesting question: can a balance be found between efficiency and social interaction? Is it more beneficial to study alone or accompanied?

Reviewing as a team

If everyone is motivated to work together, it can be a great opportunity to spend time with friends during exam time. Sometimes it happens that a classmate has better grasped a concept, and that, despite all our rereading, understanding escapes us when we study alone. In this case, studying in a group can be very beneficial, as it allows us to help each other and to fill our respective gaps.

Furthermore, a review of the effect of teaching on learning shows that students who teach the subject to others generally perform better [1]. Explaining a concept to a friend is often more engaging than doing it to yourself. In turn, this friend can ask relevant questions that cause us to think more and deepen our understanding of the subject.

Revise alone

Revising alone requires greater autonomy, especially because time management is based entirely on our own motivation. However, this method offers great flexibility: you can organize your study schedule according to the times of the day when you are most concentrated and freely decide how much time to devote to each subject. If you want to change the subject, all you have to do is do it, without having to convince an entire group.

In addition, since everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, individual study allows you to focus precisely on the concepts you are less familiar with, without wasting time on those that you already understand well. This promotes more efficient use of study time.

Reviewing with a tutor

To deepen your understanding of the subject, one-on-one tutoring is a particularly effective method. It makes it possible to adapt the content to the student's learning pace and to use personalized pedagogical approaches according to their learning style. In a research article, Bloom (1984) [2] shows that students who receive one-on-one tutoring achieve scores that are two standard deviations higher than those following traditional group instruction. He concludes that tutoring is one of the most effective learning methods, far surpassing the traditional approach. Thus, to properly prepare for an exam and maximize your performance, the use of one-on-one tutoring can be one of the most beneficial strategies.

Conclusion

In short, it may be a good idea to start with an individual study phase. This allows you to think deeply about the subject, to identify your own difficulties and to ensure that you have a good command of the essential concepts. Once this foundation is established, group study can enrich understanding by offering an opportunity to fill in oversights, clarify grey areas, and test one's ability to explain concepts. Finally, for those who want more targeted support, individual tutoring represents a very effective strategy to deepen certain points and maximize exam performance.

[1] Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R.E. (2013). The relative benefits of learning by teaching and teaching expectancy. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38(4), 281—288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2013.06.001

[2] Bloom, B.S. (1984). The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring. Educational researcher.