The Team Formation Problem in Education: A Systematic Review and Taxonomy of Its Variants and Optimisation Approaches

Deciding how to assign students to teams for effective teamwork, also known as the Team Formation Problem (TFP) in education, remains insufficiently understood despite decades of research across different disciplines offering fragmented guidance. In higher education, instructors must form short-lived teams using limited data while balancing pedagogical goals and logistical constraints, conditions that differ sharply from professional team settings. To address this fragmentation, this study develops an integrated taxonomy of educational TFP grounded in a systematic review of 35 peer-reviewed studies. Building upon perspectives from Operations Research, Organizational Psychology, and Educational Research, the taxonomy organizes TFP variants into three interrelated pillars: (1) Input attributes, which specify the student attributes used to form teams; (2) Problem formulation, which describes how attributes are manipulated and formalizes pedagogical objectives and constraints into optimization model; and (3) Solution methods, which describe the algorithms used to generate feasible team assignments. This structure clarifies the modeling decisions that underpin different TFP variants and provides a common vocabulary for describing them, enabling transparent reporting and meaningful comparison between studies that previously lacked a shared frame of reference. This structure makes explicit how pedagogical rationales, such as fairness, peer learning, or cohesion, translate into concrete modeling decisions, enabling transparent reporting and like-for-like comparison across studies that were previously not comparable. The review reveals substantial heterogeneity in how TFP variants are defined and reported, and shows that the proposed taxonomy can classify all identified formulations while exposing cross-disciplinary inconsistencies and gaps. The paper concludes with methodological guidelines that standardize how TFP variants should be specified and reported, supporting transparent communication, comparative analysis, and future benchmarking of team formation methods in educational contexts.