Methods & Tools for Group Formation

Forming effective groups is a critical issue for improving the quality of collaboration for student group work [148]. The formation of collaborative groups,

15 as addressed by Wessner and Pfister, is the process of identifying students who belong to one specific group [170]. In practice, the formation of learning groups is an educational instrument used by teachers to carry out their instructional design. Groups can be formed for different purposes. Student project groups for computer science courses are an example of task groups, which are formed to solve a specific problem. Student reading groups for language learning courses are an example of learning groups, which are formed mainly to enable learners to practice for a particular course assignment with no specific problem to solve (e.g. improving the speaking ability in English in front of other learners).

Group work in face-to-face setting and online setting each have their different features. Face-to-face group work has the advantage of verbal and non- verbal cues that can enrich the collaboration process while online group work is time independent and enables ‗many-to-many‘ interactive communication which can boost the quantity and quality of interaction between students. These different features allow groups to collaborate differently in the two settings. As revealed from Smith et al.‘s study [158], the most significant difference between face-to-

face groups and online groups was that online groups felt less able to resolve their logistical issues including scheduling, time allocation and other related issues compared to face-to-face groups. Another significant difference lied in the communication methods and tools. In online setting, text communication is mainly used whereas in face-to-face setting students can easily conduct visual communication (e.g. draw rough sketches or point to hardcopy images) besides verbal communication. However, in an exploratory study conducted by Warkentin

16 proportion of unique information items exchanged between the online and face-to- face groups. Smith et al. [158] further suggested that there were no significant difference in satisfaction with a participant‘s group between students worked in face-to-face groups and online groups. From the study conducted by Stein and Wanstreet [161], it was revealed that there were no significant difference in satisfaction with the overall course and course structure between collaborative groups in the two settings.

Groups can either be homogeneous or heterogeneous. Many advocates of collaborative learning strive for heterogeneous groups. One of the main reasons is that heterogeneity naturally produces controversy more frequently [59]. This is consistent with literature on constructive controversy [58] which believed it can bring in multiple perspectives and impact on the collective acquisition of knowledge and skill within teams. Another reason is that heterogeneous groups can demonstrate more creative behaviours than homogeneous groups [154].

In traditional class mode educational settings, teachers usually let students self-select their group partners or manually assign them to different groups. As discussed in the previous section, chosen grouping function is provided by the typical collaborative learning environments to support teachers to input the results of student self created or teacher created groups into the system. However, there are limitations for these methods. Student self created groups are usually formed based on friendship rather than for educational reasons [148]. In this case, students tend to avoid heterogeneous groups because they prefer to choose group partners who are like them in ethnicity, student status, gender, knowledge or competence. This can prevent one of the benefits of collaborative learning, that is, learning from

17 other students with different strengths and backgrounds. Manually assigned groups can increase the likelihood of heterogeneous groupings, but this does not ensure that the groups work effectively together. Moreover, constraints such as large class size and time limitation may prohibit teachers from forming groups efficiently.

Compared with chosen grouping methods, computational random grouping methods increase the efficiency of the group formation process and the likelihood of heterogeneous groupings, but do not guarantee that students satisfy their individual needs. Chapman et al. suggest that self selected student groups tend to work better than those groups selected by random assignment [154]. Their study indicated that students in randomly assigned groups generally had more concerns about working in their groups, and had slightly less positive group attitudes and lower group outcome measures. These findings agree with the results of Mahenthiran and Rouse‘s study [123] which showed that random groups obtained lower group performance and satisfaction, and demonstrated smaller individual accountability than self selected groups. As discussed in the previous section, most contemporary collaborative learning environments such as LAMS [49] and Moodle [128] can provide a random grouping function for teachers to cope with group formation tasks.

There is an increasing number of research projects taking into consideration the characteristics of individual students to develop methods and tools for supporting the group formation process. These characteristics could be subject knowledge levels, cognitive features (for example, learning styles and thinking styles), and/or personality. Existing literature such as [29,84,124,130,165,168] suggest a variety of methods for group formation based

18 on different student characteristics. A number of research studies indicated that learning styles could have a positive impact on the process of group formation for collaborative learning [7,74,139,155,165]. An extensive review of relevant literature in the impact of learning styles on group collaboration and tools that support group formation based on students‘ learning styles is provided in Section 2.2.3.

Next, a brief explanation of the learning style theories is presented.