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 instances when studying with someone else is unavoidable, like when you're assigned a group project. I'm a group project hater myself, but I admit it can be nice to split up the work on a more overwhelming workload. In fact, there are times studying together can be even more beneficial than studying alone, provided you do it right. For instance, dividing work among the members of a group can help you tackle a huge amount of text and new information. It’s called the jigsaw method.

What is the jigsaw reading method?

The jigsaw reading method is a way to break up large amounts of text and make it easier to understand. It was actually conceptualized in the 1970s, when social psychologist Elliot Aronson sought to combat racial bias among elementary-aged kids in a classroom where students had recently been integrated. He figured out how to make the environment less competitive and more cooperative among groups of children.

It was originally used for young kids, but per guidance from the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, it’s appropriate for learners of all ages. It’s designed to turn individuals into experts in unique topics, then empower them to help their peers better understand those topics.

Similar to the practice of Think, Pair, Share, this method forces you to master a specific part of the content block, then bring everyone else up to speed. It's useful for when someone in a group is shy, when the volume of material is massive, or when you have a ton of other assignments due at the same time.

How jigsaw learning works

There are actually two ways to do jigsaw learning:

1. If you have a smaller group of people to work with, break the reading into chunks of one or two paragraphs and assign everyone a chunk. Each person reads their assigned chunk and works on it until they know it extremely well, then everyone takes turns teaching the group about their mini topic. At the end of the discussion, all members of the group should understand everything the text went over—but didn’t have to read it all.

2. If you have a bigger group of people to work with, smaller groups can tackle individual chunks of text. In classroom settings, once a smaller group masters a concept, one learner leaves to sit with a different group and learn about their concept from them and the cycle goes around until everyone has had a chance to go learn from the other groups. In a college or workplace setting, this can be more easily and usefully accomplished 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're assigned a chunk of text to read and understand on your own, use a guided reading technique like KWL or SQ3R to go through it. With these, you jot down what you think you know before you start reading, as well as what you want to learn, which guides you to reading closely and finding the answers. You can use the questions and answers you wrote down to guide your discussion when it's time, making all of this pretty seamless.

If you’re 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 involves chunking the work up and giving everyone something to become an expert in. This works like the Feynman method from there: Whoever becomes the expert in a given topic is responsible for understanding it and then distilling it until it’s possible for everyone else to grasp it easily, which means that person has to truly get it first. Everyone else benefits from getting a simple explanation of a complex topic and, ultimately, everybody learns the main messages of the text, both through teaching it to group members and having it taught to them.

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