Use the “puzzle Method” to Study Complex Topics

Yes, studying alone and in a quiet place is extremely beneficial most of the time, but there are times when studying with someone else can be even more beneficial. For example, dividing work among team members can help you cope with a huge amount of text and new information. It’s called the puzzle method, and here’s how it works.

What is the method of reading a puzzle?

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 prejudice among young children in a newly integrated classroom. He figured out how to make the environment less competitive and more cooperative among groups of children.

It was originally intended for young children, but according to guidelines from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts , it is suitable for students of all ages. It’s designed to turn people into experts on unique topics and then empower them to help their peers better understand those topics.

How does puzzle training work?

There are actually two ways to learn mosaics:

1. If you have to work with a small group of people, break the reading into one or two paragraph sections and assign each person a part. Each person reads their assigned passage and works on it until they understand it well, then everyone takes turns telling the group about their mini-topic. At the end of the discussion, all group members should understand everything that is said in the text, but do not have to read it all.
2. If you have a larger group of people to work with, smaller groups can work on individual pieces of text. In a classroom, once a small group has mastered a concept, one student leaves to sit with another group and learn their concept from them, and the cycle repeats until everyone has a chance to go learn from other groups. In college or the workplace, this can be done more easily and usefully through a collaborative document: Each group can summarize what they read in a Google Doc or similar document, ultimately creating a cheat sheet that condenses the entire text into a few paragraphs.

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, as long as the basic practice involves dividing the work into parts and giving everyone something to work with . become an expert. From here it works like the Feynman method : whoever becomes an expert on a given topic is responsible for understanding it and then refining it until everyone else can easily understand it, meaning that the person must actually get it first. Everyone else benefits from a simple explanation of a complex topic, and eventually everyone will grasp the main ideas of the text, both by teaching it to group members and by learning from it.