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

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.