An Agent-Based Simulator Applied to Teaching-Learning Process to Predict Sociometric Indices in Higher Education

Abstract

Most novice teachers and even some experienced teachers can lack appropriate tools for designing teaching strategies that ensure the quality of education. The ability of working in teams is crucial in educating professionals. The literature proves that social relations influence the performance of teams. For instance, the team cohesion is directly related with its performance. In the current work, we have developed an agent-based tool for assisting teachers in simulating their teaching strategies to estimate their influence on the group sociometrics like cohesion, coherence of reciprocal relations, dissociation and density of relations. The experiments with nine scenarios in disciplines of computer science, electronic, psychology, business, tourism and renewal energies with 239 students and six teachers including experienced and novice ones show that its underlying agentbased framework can adapt to different disciplines obtaining similar outcomes to the real ones. We learned that the tool was especially reliable in predicting the density of relations and the cohesion, being the latter one probably the most relevant due to its known relation with academic performance. In addition, we also learned that it was difficult to assess the prediction quality of the dissociation in higher education, due to the usual low amounts or absence of reciprocal rejections in the students' groups in this educational stage. The presented agent-based tool is publicly distributed as open source for facilitating other researchers in following this research line.

An Evaluation Method for the Construction of Double-Qualified Teachers in Vocational Schools Based on ID3 Algorithm and Neural Networking

“…The weight of indicators in the objective weighting evaluation method is provided by objective information. Specialist test system is applied to educating, and evaluation is completed in mix with the free factor normalized fractional relapse coefficient of different direct relapse examination, head part investigation, and list commitment pace of variable investigation [22,23]. The evaluation of showing staff development fundamentally includes three viewpoints: instructors' instructing, understudies' learning, and the last quality and impact of study hall educating.…”

Coding and educational robotics with peers: The C0D1NC experience to foster inclusion

“…Starting from the sociomatrices, we built the sociograms and calculated various indexes described by Garcia-Magarino et al (2019), with the software Gephi, an open-source software for analysing and visualising social networks (Bastian et al, 2009). The groups receiving the intervention were compared with a control group that was not involved in C0D1NC activities.…”

Educational Robotics to Foster and Assess Social Relations in Students' Groups

“…The average corresponds to the ratio between connections (edges) and the number of participants (nodes). Here, the Social Intensity, Cohesion, Dissociation, and Coherence indexes are also reported (Garcia-Magarino et al, 2019).…”

“…Starting from the sociomatrices, we built the sociograms and calculated various indexes, as described by Garcia-Magarino et al ( 2019 ), with the software Gephi, an open-source software package for analysis and visualization of social networks (Bastian et al, 2009 ).…”