A method for supporting heterogeneous-group formation through heuristics and visualization

Group formation is a key issue in e-learning environments that make use of collaborative work to enhance student performance. While there are many ways to arrange students to work in cooperative groups, recent works have shown that learning styles offer good opportunities to organize students. Particularly, it seems the case that regarding learning styles, heterogeneous groups tend to perform better than groups formed by students with similar characteristics. This work addresses the issue of supporting the authors’ task of forming effective learner groups to improve student and group performance. This support is provided through a supervised method which, backed by a visualization tool, is able to produce groups with a good level of heterogeneity. Moreover, this method is not time-consuming for teachers.This project has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (TIN2007-64718) and Comunidad Autonoma de Madrid (S2009/TIC-1650)