Unequal participation poses a challenge to collaborative learning because it reduces opportunities for fruitful collaboration among learners and affects learners’ satisfaction. Social group awareness tools can display information on the distribution of participation and thus encourage groups to regulate the distribution of participation. However, some groups might require additional explicit support to leverage the information from such a tool. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of combining a group awareness tool and adaptive collaboration prompts on the distribution of participation during web-based collaboration. In this field experiment, students in a university level online course collaborated twice for two-weeks (16 groups in the first task; 13 groups in the second task) and either received only a group awareness tool, a combination of a group awareness tool and adaptive collaboration prompts, or no additional support. Our results showed that students were more satisfied when the participation in their group was more evenly distributed. However, we only found tentative support that the collaboration support helped groups achieve equal participation. Students reported rarely using the support for shared regulation of participation. Sequence alignment and clustering of action sequences revealed that groups who initiated the collaboration early, coordinated before solving the problem and interacted continuously tended to achieve an equal distribution of participation and were more satisfied with the collaboration. Against the background of our results, we identify potential ways to improve group awareness tools for supporting groups in their regulation of participation, and discuss the premise of equal participation during collaborative learning.

不平等的参与对协作学习构成了挑战，因为它减少了学习者之间进行富有成效的协作的机会，并影响了学习者的满意度。社交团体意识工具可以显示有关参与分布的信息，从而鼓励团体规范参与的分布。但是，某些团体可能需要其他显式支持才能利用此类工具提供的信息。因此，本研究调查了在基于Web的协作过程中结合使用群体意识工具和自适应协作提示对参与分布的影响。在这项现场实验中，大学水平在线课程的学生进行了为期两周的两次协作（第一项任务为16组；第二项任务为13组），或者只接受了一项小组意识工具，群组意识工具和自适应协作提示的组合，或者没有其他支持。我们的结果表明，当他们的小组中的参与分布更均匀时，学生会更加满意。但是，我们仅发现了暂时性的支持，即协作支持可以帮助团体实现平等参与。学生报告称很少使用支持来共享参与规则。序列比对和动作序列的聚类表明，较早发起协作，在解决问题之前进行协调并持续互动的小组往往会实现参与的均等分布，并且对协作更满意。在我们结果的背景下，