How unequal is unequal? Turn-taking simulation for benchmarking participation and opportunity inequality in small-group collaboration

Liru Hu, Jiajun Wu, Feng Yu, Deliang Wang, Song An and Ying Zhang

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 10, 1-27

Abstract: Participation equity is essential for ensuring that students gain cognitive and social benefits from collaborative learning, yet there is a lack of quantitative benchmarks for interpreting participation and opportunity distributions in small-group collaboration. This study focuses on two turn-based analytical dimensions of participation equity: participation equality, measured by students’ shares of speaking turns, and opportunity equality, measured by students’ shares of addressed opportunities. Using the standard deviation of these rates, the study establishes preliminary, context-specific simulation-based reference values for identifying departures from an idealized triadic turn-taking baseline. The empirical dataset included 117 fourth-grade primary school students from two classes in mainland China, who worked in heterogeneous triads on mathematical and reading tasks. Using agent-based modeling and Monte Carlo simulation, the study estimated local turn-taking parameters from empirical data, generated reference distributions under an ideal-equity baseline, and conducted sensitivity analyses to examine model stability. Results support the internal stability of the model and provide turn-count-specific reference values for interpreting participation and opportunity inequality. The findings offer preliminary reference values for interpreting participation and opportunity distributions in collaborative learning and highlight the importance of turn count when evaluating structural patterns of participation and opportunity in triadic classroom dialogue. These reference values describe structural participation patterns rather than collaboration quality and require recalibration and independent validation before application in other educational settings.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0361205 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 61205&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0361205

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0361205

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().