Dynamic grouping strategies based on a conceptual graph for cooperative learning

Abstract

In large classrooms, teachers rarely have time to monitor the status of individual students. As a result, students who learn quickly thoroughly grasp the content, while students who learn slowly fall further and further behind until, in some cases, the education system gives up on them completely. Teachers thus need a system to help them obtain the status of all students and manage particular students. This study proposes a novel learning process based on the conceptual graph, a knowledge representation tool. This study adopts cooperative learning to let students conduct further studies through interaction with each other. The proposed strategy acquires and measures the knowledge structure of students. According to the knowledge structure of individual students, this study proposes dynamic-grouping and partial-regrouping to identify suitable partners for students. The proposed strategy achieves the best complementary groups for further learning stages. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed method significantly improves the learning achievement of all learners. Additionally, the questionnaire results indicate that learners respond positively to the proposed grouping strategy.