Feedback from e-assessment and e-tasks in mathematics education – a narrative review of the literature

This narrative literature review examines published peer-reviewed research from 2012 to 2024 on feedback originating from e-assessment and e-tasks in the context of secondary and university mathematics teaching. The review identified 33 papers meeting the criteria set. First, we explored trends in e-feedback research over the period, showing how they reflect recent developments in digital resources and e-assessment. In this time, emphasis moved from concerns with accurate scoring to providing elaborated feedback including metacognitive support, and to studies of teacher professional development for using e-assessment. Emerging principles for the design of e-feedback relate to timing, personalization and adaptivity, interactivity and teacher support. Similarly, design principles have emerged to support student-centred approaches to teaching, and to encourage self-regulation and metacognition. Studies also investigated how teacher agency operates across diverse digital contexts—designing tasks that enable useful feedback, interpreting learning analytics, and orchestrating class activities using feedback. This set of papers reveals considerable change over the period reviewed. We envisage the diversity of research goals to continue as the capacity to provide insightful automated feedback on e-tasks to teachers and students evolves with evolving technology.