Collaborative groups in a medical learning environment

This paper addresses collaborative learning in the medical domain, focusing on the evaluation of a component specially devised to promote collaborative learning using the AMPLIA system. AMPLIA is an intelligent multi-agent environment that supports diagnostic reasoning and the modeling of diagnostic hypotheses in the medical domain. Recently it has been extended with a new component providing aid on workgroup formation. Workgroups are built considering the individual aspects of students as the learning style, performance, affective state, personality traits, and also group aspects such as acceptance and social skills. This paper presents and discusses the results of an experiment evaluating the quality of workgroups that was composed according to suggestions provided by the system.