Effects of grouping on friendships and group composition methods using social network analysis

One of the most important factors for enriching student life is the promotion of good relationships among the students. Furthermore, good relationships among students lead to effective learning. Accordingly, teachers need to help students form good friendships through classwork. Cooperative learning, student and a task for the group to accomplish, is one of the most common methods of active learning and generate friendships. We friendship networks among university students. We then propose methods for composing groups to generate friendships. We apply our proposed methods to actual cooperative learning activities and observe their effects. An analysis of the resulting friendship networks show that students grouped by the proposed methods made more friends than students grouped by a conventional method. Questionnaire results show that satisfaction with the lecture of the students grouped by the proposed methods were higher than that of the students grouped by the conventional method.