Compare and Contrast Essay: Group Work vs. Lectures
Indeed, group work has been proven by educators to be helpful and beneficial to students as it promotes positive experience for the students. It has been remarked by some that group assignments are more important than traditional lecture-based instruction for college life, a rather unfair observation, as lecture has unique merits that cannot be found in group work. In fact, overshadowing lecture-based instruction with group assignment can impinge the students' academic life.
Certainly, group work has the very advantage that lecture-based instruction cannot duplicate: it allows students to openly discuss in their classrooms, therefore create an active learning atomsphere. Instead of the lecturer giving the answer straight forward, students have a chance to learn and discover the material in classroom by themselves. This unique feature change the traditional passive receptive role of students, allowing them to practice critical thinking abilities, which is crucial in college life. Furthermore, this type of instruction allow students to understand the process of learning by hearing what their peers speak. For example, students might arrive to the same conclusion with different approaches, which can inspire other students to think in different ways. Therefore, in this way, the students help each other with their own creative thinking.
The merits of group work, however, are not enough to totally replace lecture-based instruction. In higher division lectures, the topics tend to be harder and more complex, and in the learning process, it is the lecturer who has the ability to guide students from potential distractions. In fact, students who enrolled in higher division classes usually have larger variance at their knowledge level and learning abilities. Therefore, group work can be fruitless if forced in such classrooms as some students are not able to provide valuable material or follow the top students. In this case, the lecturers can serve as a guide to make sure everyone in their classroom is in the same page. Furthermore, since the lecturers certainly know their material better and more comprehensively, they usually are able to explain their subjects in a clear way. Whereas in group work-based instruction, even if a students know their topics well, they might not be able to explain the very material well to their peers, therefore creating more confusion.
Lastly, if colleges and universities completely removed lecture-based instruction, there might be some systematic problem for the school for some entry level classes. As these kind of classes are really popular and have more spaces for students to enroll, it would be impossible to assign group-based discussion as it would be really hard to manage a large number of students in such a large classroom. It would also be impractical to separate large classes into smaller classes, as it requires large spaces and huge amount of instructors. So it would be impractical to change these huge lectures into group-work based classes.
To sum up, group work based classes certainly have their merits to promote active learning experience for students. However, for some lectures, it would be either unfit or impractical to completely change into group assignment based classes.
