Abstract:

This study addresses the lack of validated procedures for assigning cooperative roles in secondary education by designing, validating, and applying the Herramienta Basada en Roles Cooperativos (HBRC), a questionnaire intended to support the structured formation of student teams in Cooperative Learning (CL). The instrument contains 20 Likert-type items covering five common roles in school-based cooperation: coordinator, controller, spokesperson, secretary, and assistant. Its development combined theoretical review, expert judgement, and pilot testing, with the aim of producing an accessible classroom tool that aligns role assignment with students’ perceived strengths and preferences.

Validation was conducted in several stages. Content validity was examined by 10 experts, and a pilot study with 84 secondary school students confirmed item clarity and feasibility of administration. The final psychometric analysis was carried out with 473 students. Reliability indices were acceptable for exploratory purposes across the role dimensions, and construct validity was examined through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using principal axis factoring with oblique rotation. The results supported a four-factor structure that explained 55.43% of the common variance. Rather than reproducing five isolated roles, the structure grouped items into broader functions: coordination and organizational support, secretarial and administrative organization, communication and representation, and instrumental assistance. This pattern suggests that cooperative roles in school teams operate through complementary, interdependent functions rather than through rigidly separate categories.

After validation, the HBRC was applied to 173 first-year secondary education students from six classes in two schools in Spain. Students’ role-affinity profiles were used to form heterogeneous teams of four or five members, assigning one role to each student according to the best fit. These HBRC-based teams were compared with alternative teams formed through random assignment. Students then completed a self-perception questionnaire assessing four dimensions: perceived fit with the assigned role, perceived quality and fairness of role distribution, group cohesion, and satisfaction with the assigned team. In all four dimensions, teams formed with HBRC achieved higher scores than randomly formed teams. Differences were statistically significant, with effect sizes ranging from small to moderate, and no significant differences were found between teams of four and five members.

The findings indicate that informed role assignment can improve students’ perceived competence, acceptance of the group structure, sense of belonging, and satisfaction with cooperative work. From a pedagogical perspective, the HBRC appears to be a feasible and transferable tool for classroom planning, helping teachers reduce improvisation and build more equitable, predictable, and socially cohesive learning environments. At the same time, the study remains preliminary: the sample was limited to one educational stage and two schools, the evaluation focused on anticipated rather than longitudinal team functioning, and further refinement of several items and confirmatory validation with independent samples are still needed. Even so, the study provides solid initial evidence that deliberate role-based team formation can strengthen both the organizational quality and the socioemotional experience of cooperative learning.

Keywords:

Cooperative learning, secondary education, team formation, cooperative roles, questionnaire validation, psychometric analysis, group cohesion, role assignment.