Development of students’ iterative conjecturing through an online personal feedback process

Conjectures are an essential part of reasoning, yet research shows students often stay at the initial stage of conjecturing without engaging in repeated inquiry. In Harel, R., Olsher, S., & Yerushalmy, M. (2022. Personal elaborated feedback design in support of students’ conjecturing processes. Research in Mathematics Education, 26(1), 70–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/14794802.2022.2137571), we introduced a design principle for online personalised detailed feedback to support students’ conjecturing. In this study, we examined how students’ interactions with feedback influenced their iterative process of forming conjectures. Fifty-eight high school students from grades 9 to 11 completed an example-eliciting task related to linear and quadratic functions. They were asked to formulate a conjecture and digitally create and submit supporting examples. They could continue their inquiry after automatically receiving detailed information, and we analyzed how personal feedback impacted their personal example space and the development of their conjectures. The results show that most students chose to continue their inquiry, varied their examples, and generalised their initial conjectures.