Interval Inner Evaluations From Multiple Perspectives for Group Formation

Abstract

Teachers make student groups based on their profiles for effective collaborative learning in the classroom or online. We represent a student profile with their inner evaluations of both knowledge level and social interaction criteria. Each student evaluates herself on how much confidence s/he has in each criterion from the optimistic viewpoint. At the same time, from the pessimistic viewpoint, s/he gives self-evaluations on how much worried about the criteria. The peer evaluations from the other students replace the self-evaluations on confidence and worry. The judgments from several viewpoints increase reliability, though the multiple perspectives are not always consistent. The inconsistency stems from the uncertainty of the actual evaluations. In this study, we denote the student profile as a normalized interval vector of the criteria evaluation to reflect the uncertainty. We propose the model to obtain the interval evaluations of criteria from those of multiple crisp evaluations considering relative relations. The idea is similar to Interval AHP, which derives the interval normalized vector from a crisp pairwise comparison matrix. Then, we form the groups so that their group performances are similar.