Personal elaborated feedback design in support of students’ conjecturing processes

Conjectures are a key component of mathematical inquiry, a process in which the students raise conjectures, refute or dismiss some of them, and formulate additional ones. Taking a design-based research approach, we formulated a design principle for personal feedback in supporting the iterative process of conjecturing. We empirically explored the design principle by studying the use that four pairs of high school students made of online feedback when working on two example-eliciting tasks. Analysis focused on the ways in which the feedback was apparent in the students’ reasoning process. The findings indicate that designed elaborated feedback supported interactions that led students to formulate new conjectures and motivated them to resume the inquiry and to generalise their initial conjecture.