In today’s education landscape, there has been a pervasive debate on the way students study. Some experts believe that group training has a pivotal role in children’s education, while others oppose this idea and insist on self-education. In this essay, I will provide the merits of both methods and highlight my own perspective regarding this discussion.
One of the main advantages of studying in a group is its social aspects. When students engage in conversations with their peers in a group, they will develop their communication skills and also their self-confidence. For example, when I was working with first-grade students in primary school for one of my cognitive research projects, I found interesting results. Children with low self-esteem and a low ability to interact with other people showed their interest in cooperating with their group members when they were asked to talk about the lessons they learned from a story in their literature book. After a semester, they illustrated a significant improvement in their social communication, even with strangers outside of the school. They also gained valuable confidence to share their ideas regarding daily problems.
On the other hand, studying on your own can offer benefits that can not be abnegated. One of them is focus. When you study alone, you can prevent distractions which may result in concentration on what you study. If I want to cite an example, I can mention my education period. When I was younger, I suffered from group conversations regarding solving mathematics problems because I could not concentrate on what steps I should consider to find an optimal solution for the questions. In contrast, when the teacher let us come up with ideas to solve that problem on our own, I always showed perfect performance in a shorter time.
In conclusion, while I am aware of both sides’ pros, I suggest investigating a combination procedure that can offer advancement in social skills and also a suitable environment for students’ concentration. I mean, for experimental studies such as biology, which can be done in laboratories, it will be better to divide children into several groups for their tasks, but for mathematics courses, which require a considerable focus on problems, students should study alone. By employing this combined strategy, more students will benefit from the study environment.