Group Study Method Is Simply Good

Learn and communication

Sometimes group study can be a productive thing, and sometimes, not so much.  Group study becomes less than productive when your study sessions turn into occasions for friends to get together to have a good time and share gossip.  Often, there’s little actual study that goes on during these sessions. However, that doesn’t have to be the case.  With a little planning and hard work, your study group can really help each other master your course material.  One of the best ways of doing this is through what’s called the Study Guide Exchange.

The Study Guide Exchange means this:  Each of you in your study group (an ideal number is 4 to 6) is responsible for creating a study guide for the class chapter or unit, based on your own notes.  That is, you should put your notes into a logically-flowing order and type it out in such a way that it can teach OTHER people what you’ve studied during the past few weeks.  After each of you has produced your study guide, you then make copies and share these with the other members of the group.  Let’s look in more detail at the steps involved in your Study Guide Exchange.

1) First, be sure that you have what’s necessary to make your study guide. This means your class notes and textbook, computer, and computer paper.

2) Decide which subject you’re creating the guide for. Most likely, this will be the class that your entire group shares.

3) Now study your textbook and lecture notes, highlighting all key points that you think you’ll need to understand for the test.  This is an important step, because each of you might have slightly different views of what is and isn’t important.  That’s what makes this idea so powerful:  You’re pulling in four or five different ideas about what you should learn.

4) Try to keep your study guide to 8 to 10 pages. More than that, when you consider that everyone will be reading three or four or five of these, will be overwhelming.

5) Emphasize important points through the use of bold-faced or different colored fonts.

6) Throughout the guide, after you go over a couple of important points, include questions with blanks after them. Then in the back of the study guide, have an answer page, so that everyone can check their answers.

7) While you’re working on the answer page, double check to be sure that all of your answers can be found by the others without too much of a strain.

8) To distribute these, you can do one of two things: Either print out enough for everyone, or just get everyone’s email address and email it to them.  Make sure that they have the program that they need to open the file (Word format, or .doc,, is a standard that most people should have, but make sure before you email them).  Either way, everyone will wind up printing one copy.

Theoretically, you can all now study each other’s study guides individually, but feel free to get together as a group and quiz each other on them as well.

As mentioned earlier, this idea works better when you don’t have too many people in your study group.  You can imagine how overwhelming it would be if you have 10 friends in the group, all creating their own 10 page study guide.  This would be a 100 page study guide for each unit in your class, and that’s a bit much for any student to digest.  Keep it to a small group, though, and this method will benefit the class grade for anyone who truly studies the guides.