Today's edition of Inside Higher Education reports on a study of peer instruction and concludes that students learn more when they have an opportunity to discuss concepts with their classmates. The study was able to differentiate between just mimicking answers from smarter classmates and actually learning information that could be applied to different questions and hypotheticals, and researchers found that actual learning increased when students talked about new material together. While the study dealt exclusively with in-class learning, there's nothing to suggest that the same wouldn't be true of out-of-class collaboration like study groups.
Preliminary results of a follow-up study suggests that the best formula for learning is a combination of instructor-led and peer-led discussions.
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