A method for determining pairs of students in collaborative learning

摘要

In senior high schools collaborative learning has become a reality because an idea not obtained by an individual learning can emerge. It is well known that the effectiveness of collaborative learning depends on the combination of students with various aptitudes. Therefore it is important how to determine the pairs of students from all members in a classroom. In this paper, a method for determining the optimal combination of pairs of students is proposed when technical high school students learn to design printed circuit boards collaboratively. For this purpose, first the correctness rates of their pairwise works are predicted by using neural networks. Consequently, the contribution of the individual aptitudes for the design problem to the correctness rate becomes clear. Secondly, a method to form the pairs of students optimally is proposed by applying an improved local search method. It is found from a numerical experiment that the correctness rate of the whole class with sixty two students attains more than seventy percentage as compared with that of the best student.