Abstract

This research paper outlines and evaluates a method to efficiently assign students to groups in an academic setting. Group work is an important part of academic learning. Prior research shows that data-oriented group assignment methods outperform self selected and random methods. We introduce the Group Assignment Tool, an automated method to perform data-oriented group assignment in an academic setting. The Group Assignment Tool maximizes the benefits of instructor-assigned groups by performing probabilistic weighted optimization of groups based on student survey data. We show that the Group Assignment Tool produces comparable outcomes to prior hill climbing algorithms for group formation with significantly faster runtime, and produces groups which score within a small factor of optimal scores. We present the GAT via a traditional presentation as well as a demonstration.