Validating the concept of immediacy of strategy use for the regulation of collaborative learning: Results from an expert study

During collaborative learning, different types of regulation problems such as cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and emotional problems between group members may hinder the learning process. Once groups have noticed a problem, they need to apply a regulation strategy for the problem to alleviate it. Yet, so far, it is unclear which regulation strategies to use in the light of what problem. Therefore, we propose the concept of immediacy of strategy use: A regulation strategy is considered immediate for a problem if it can solve this problem without further strategies necessary. In this study, we tested the content validity of this immediacy concept by using an expert study methodology. We explored (a) which regulation strategies experts regard as immediate for which problems, (b) to what extent they agree in their immediacy ratings, and (c) whether they distinctly categorize regulation strategies into immediate and non-immediate strategies for specific problems. N = 59 experts rated the immediacy of 27 regulation strategies for eight social regulation problems. Our results indicate that experts can concordantly identify an immediate regulation strategy for regulation problems. The only exceptions were the regulation problems “Incompatible Working Methods” and “Unfair Distribution of Work Load”. Additionally, for each problem, we could clearly differentiate between various immediate and non-immediate regulation strategies. In summary, our findings strongly support the content validity of the immediacy concept. Future research could implement and investigate the immediacy concept in educational practice to support immediate strategy use for problem regulation during collaborative learning.