Composing Groups in Collaborative Learning by Pair Personality Differences

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that the personality composition of a group significantly affects learners’ satisfaction during collaborative learning. However, while these studies investigated a group as a whole by focusing on group statistics, such as the mean and standard deviation of the members’ personalities, they paid little attention to the personality differences of individual pairs within the group, albeit the group contains many pairwise interactions. In this paper, we studied whether and how pairwise personality differences between a learner and groupmates affect the learner’s satisfaction. Examining data collected from an employee training program during which learners had reflective group discussions, we confirmed that pairwise personality differences significantly affect a learner’s level of satisfaction in the program. Specifically, satisfaction is affected by (1) the average of the personality differences between the learner and each individual groupmate, which reflects the degree to which the learner is different from the groupmates on average, and (2) the personality difference from the groupmate who has the most different/similar personality from/to the learner.