My experience is in the context of teaching mathematics in particular. Mainly calculus because that is be there level at which pedagogy theories are typically

My experience is in the context of teaching mathematics in particular. Mainly calculus because that is be there level at which pedagogy theories are typically experimented with most. In upper level classes are typically straight lectures. Edit: I meant "opinion" in the sense that you don't really have much to say to your partner about a technical topic you don't understand yet. And in much of math you don't have intuition you can verbalize until you've worked many problems, which means the time to have conversations with your peers about it is probably not the same time you're learning it for the first time. That may explain why in practice the students who read the book before hand are often really just instructing the other students when they are having discussions.