E-didactical contracts in students’ interactions with feedback-providing systems

Digital assessment systems offer new possibilities for providing feedback in mathematics, yet little is known about how students learn from such feedback. This study examines undergraduate students’ interactions with feedback in STACK – an interactive e-assessment environment based on example-generation tasks. Drawing on the theory of didactical contracts, we introduce the notion of e-didactical contracts to capture the approaches that students adopt when working with feedback-providing systems. Our analysis of think-aloud interviews with 17 undergraduate mathematics students in the UK and New Zealand identified three types of contracts: affirmation, guidance, and outsourcing. The contracts differ in the roles the students ascribe to the system and themselves, the anticipated use of feedback, and the locus of mathematical knowledge. Students also shifted between contracts within a session, in response to the demands of particular tasks and the affordances of the system. Our findings show that students can interact in ways that challenge task designers’ assumptions, thereby informing research on feedback and e-assessment. This manuscript is currently under consideration for publication in ZDM – Mathematics Education.