Underrepresented students face many significant challenges in their education. In particular, they often have a harder time than their peers from majority groups in building long-term high-quality study groups. This challenge is exacerbated in remote-learning scenarios, where students are unable to meet face-to-face and must rely on pre-existing networks for social support. We present a scalable system that removes structural obstacles faced by underrepresented students and supports all students in building inclusive and flexible study groups. One of our main goals is to make the traditionally informal and unstructured process of finding study groups for homework more equitable by providing a uniform but lightweight structure. We aim to provide students from underrepresented groups an experience that is similar in quality to that of students from majority groups. Our process is unique in that it allows students the opportunity to request group reassignments during the semester if they wish. Unlike other collaboration tools our system is not mandatory and does not use peer-evaluation. We trialed our approach in a 1000+ student introductory Engineering and Computer Science course that was conducted entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that students from underrepresented backgrounds were more likely to ask for group-matching support compared to students from majority groups. At the same time, underrepresented students that we matched into study groups had group experiences that were comparable to students we matched from majority groups. B-range students in high-comfort and high-quality groups had improved learning outcomes.

翻译：来自少数群体的学生在教育过程中面临诸多重大挑战。与多数群体同龄人相比，他们往往更难以建立长期高质量的学习小组。在远程学习场景中，这一挑战更为严峻——学生无法面对面交流，必须依赖既有社交网络获取支持。我们提出一个可扩展的系统，该系统能够消除少数群体学生面临的结构性障碍，并支持所有学生组建包容且灵活的学习小组。我们的主要目标之一，是为寻找作业学习小组这一传统上非正式且无结构的过程提供统一而轻量的框架，从而促进公平性。我们旨在让少数群体学生获得与多数群体学生同等质量的体验。该过程的独特之处在于，学生若有意愿，可在学期中申请重新分组。与其他协作工具不同，我们的系统非强制性使用，且不涉及互评机制。我们在一门完全在线进行的千余人规模的工程与计算机科学入门课程中（于新冠疫情期间开展）测试了这一方法。研究发现，相比于多数群体学生，少数群体背景的学生更倾向于寻求小组匹配支持。同时，经我们匹配进入学习小组的少数群体学生，其小组体验与匹配的多数群体学生相当。处于高舒适度与高质量小组中的B级学生，其学习成果得到显著提升。