A Study of Optimal Grouping in Collaborative Learning

• Main Authors: Chun-Heng Chen, 陳俊亨
• Other Authors: Koun-Tem Sun
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/98688203283388621468

碩士 === 國立臺南大學 === 資訊教育研究所教學碩士班 === 94 === Collaborative learning has become one of the most important teaching strategies in recent years. Collaborative learning has been prevailed in today’s classrooms. However, collaborative learning should be implemented with good grouping strategy to stimulate students’ learning interest and to optimize group and individual learning growth. To help teachers in grouping, this study presents a grouping strategy based on Webb and others studies (Webb, 1982a, 1982b, 1984; Webb & Cullian, 1983). The principle of this grouping strategy is to group students with middle ability as homogenous groups and to blend high ability students and low ability students as mixed groups. This grouping strategy also provides teachers the flexibility to adjust groups in terms of the teaching topics and/or the goals that students should achieve so that the students’ learning can reach their maximum. Three different distributions of student ability were studied. Forty student abilities were randomly generated from a student ability distribution to form a class. Five thousand classes are simulated under each assumption of student ability distribution. We found that the optimal grouping strategy is as the following. A teacher can use the median of student abilities in a class to select half of students with ability most close to the median as homogenous groups and others as mixed groups. In addition, this study proves that using clustering grouping minimizes sum of absolute difference within homogenous groups and using alternating grouping maximize sum of absolute difference within mixed groups. This study also found that switching students with the same rank in mixed groups does not affect the overall sum of absolute difference of mixed group. This gives teachers flexibility on group adjustment. Key words: Collaborative learning, optimal grouping, homogenous group, mixed group