Dynamic Grouping in Collaborative Learning Supported by Wireless Handhelds

One of the most important decisions to be made in a face-to-face collaborative learning activity is how groups are composed. These compositions produce different learning and social interaction results. The possibility to change the group member composition in real time and dynamically may permit to level up the learning results and improve the social relationships among the participants. Besides, the change in composition facilitates the analysis of the best criteria to be used in a determined activity. We propose a face-to-face collaborative environment supported by wireless handhelds, which allows for dynamic changes in the composition of the groups, while an activity is being performed. Three different changes of group composition were applied on one environment and compared with another similar environment where no group composition changes were performed. The results obtained show significant improvement , qualitative and quantitative, on the environment where dynamic grouping was performed. . Moreover, the criteria for group composition that produce different social interaction results were identified.