A Steady-state Evolutionary Algorithm for Building Collaborative Learning Teams in Educational Environments Considering the Understanding Levels and Interest Levels of the Students

Abstract

Collaborative learning team building is a fundamental, difficult and time-consuming task in educational environments. In this paper, we address a collaborative learning team building problem that considers two valuable grouping criteria usually considered by teachers. One of these criteria considers the understanding levels of the students with respect of the topics of a given course, and is based on building well-balanced teams in terms of the understanding levels of their members. The other criterion considers the interest levels of the students with respect of the topics of a given course, and is based on building well-balanced teams in terms of the interest levels of their members. The problem addressed has been recognised as an NP-Hard optimization problem. To solve the problem, we propose a steady-state evolutionary algorithm. This algorithm aims to organize the students taking a given course into teams in such a way that the two grouping criteria of the problem are optimized. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on nine problem instances with different levels of complexity, and is compared with that of the only algorithm previously proposed for solving the addressed problem. The obtained results show that the steady-state evolutionary algorithm significantly outperforms the previous algorithm.