Quality of Group Formation in CSCL Environments

Abstract

Group Formation (GF) plays a vital role in groupwork performance, for it is the opening phase of the group development process. Many studies have been conducted to form groups in various scenarios to enhance collaborative learning. These studies used different clustering techniques, and therefore, the applied evaluation measures in each study depend on the context of the group formation process. However, there is a lack of an integrative framework to qualify the overall process of group formation. This paper proposes such a framework that is composed of layers to tackle each issue related to the GF process. The framework is called the framework of the Quality of Group Formation (QoGF). QoGF includes three different levels in which every level has its evaluation measures. These measures are group quality, group formation quality and empirical quality, which are totaled in an aggregative measure called Total Quality (TQ).