Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of group formation in collaborative learning by considering the students' characteristics. The proposed solution is based on a Genetic Algorithm (GA), which minimizes an objective function that has two main aims. Indeed, the proposed GA's fitness function helps to achieve two objectives: Fairness in the formation of different groups, resulting in intergroup homogeneity, and a low gap in the levels of students within a group, which corresponds to intragroup homogeneity. Exhaustive experiments were conducted using three different sizes of randomly generated data sets and several crossover operators. Indeed, the order crossover and the crossovers based on random keys representation are experimented. The reported results show that the proposed approach guarantees the efficient grouping of students. In addition, comparisons with existing approaches based on GA confirm the ability of the proposed approach to provide greater intergroup and intragroup homogeneity. In addition, the uniform crossover based on random keys representation ensures better grouping quality than do the other experimented crossover operators.