Optimization of Grouping and Team Formation of Students for Class Exercise Based on Analysis of Human Factors by Covariance Structure Analysis

摘要

Group exercises for software development adopting more practical approaches are conducted in Department of Information Science and Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology in order to allow students to acquire knowledge and skills for software development. (Such student groups can be recognized as "teams" in a precise sense because each student member belonging to the group takes certain partial charge of software development.) But the class time for students acquiring software engineering is limited. That is why the support system, which is called EtUDE (Environment for Ultimate software Development Exercise), has been developed and introduced to help students to take practice together at any time and any place. However, differences in students' abilities for software development have sometimes led to problems like that some teams can not achieve a given task by due date. To solve the problems, Hashiura, et al. [1] developed the system, EtUDE/GO which automatically decides an optimal scheme for grouping and team formation for class work. In spite of this, human factors influencing on the team formation remained unknown. Therefore, the authors introduced a covariance structure analysis and so on to find a relational expression between true factors influencing directly on team formation and alternative characteristics having effect indirectly on it. Applying the obtained relational expressions to EtUDE/GO, they produced an optimal team formation scheme automatically. Then, how the optimization of team formation exerted influences on the class exercises by measuring each student's contribution evaluated with log information of their work. The result of the analysis showed that the students who were expected to make contributions for achievement of tasks and who were disposed in each team assisted their team well so as to complete the tasks in actual class exercise as they were expected. As a result, all the team was confirmed to have achieved the assignment without delay. In fact, this paper shows it was confirmed that the optimization of team formation enabled all the teams to complete the exercise assignment by due date.