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Grouping students in educational settings

Published: 24 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Given a class of large number of students, each exhibiting a different ability level, how can we group them into sections so that the overall gain for students is maximized? This question has been a topic of central concern and debate amongst social scientists and policy makers for a long time. We propose a framework for rigorously studying this question, taking a computational perspective. We present a formal definition of the grouping problem and investigate some of its variants. Such variants are determined by the desired number of groups as well as the definition of the gain for each student in the group. We focus on two natural instantiations of the gain function and we show that for both of them the problem of identifying a single group of students that maximizes the gain among its members can be solved in polynomial time. The corresponding partitioning problem, where the goal is to partition the students into non-overlapping groups appear to be much harder. However, the algorithms for the single-group version can be leveraged for solving the more complex partitioning problem. Our experiments with generated data coming from different distributions demonstrate that our algorithm is significantly better than the current strategies in vogue for dividing students in a class into sections.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    KDD '14: Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
    August 2014
    2028 pages
    ISBN:9781450329569
    DOI:10.1145/2623330
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 24 August 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. MOOC
    2. clustering
    3. groups
    4. large classes
    5. massive courses
    6. partitioning
    7. teams

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    • (2024)Team assembly approach based in social modellingSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-024-01307-914:1Online publication date: 25-Jul-2024
    • (2023)Predicting Task Planning Ability for Learners Engaged in Searching as Learning Based on Tree-Structured Long Short-Term Memory NetworksApplied Sciences10.3390/app13231284013:23(12840)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
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