Evaluating automatic group formation mechanisms to promote collaborative learning - a case study

Abstract

Group work is an important resource that educators have in order to promote collaborative learning situations. In several domains it has been exploited as a valuable teaching strategy. In technical domains, such as logic programming, results on the effect of collaborative activities on learning remains still uncertain. In this sense, this paper intends to contribute with one main research questions: can an automatic group formation mechanism be able to form consistent and successful groups for learning activities? In order to answer this question, we have prepared an experiment with students from computer programming undergraduate course. Students were asked to work individually and in automatically formed pairs. Our conclusion is that group work can help and bring benefits to most learners. We demonstrate in this paper that automatic techniques can produce coherent results regarding group formation.