One of the most prevalent features of digital mathematics textbooks, compared to traditional ones, is the provision of automated feedback on students’ solutions. Since feedback is regarded as an important factor that influences learning, this is often seen as an affordance of digital mathematics textbooks. While there is a large body of mainly quantitative research on the effectiveness of feedback in general, very little is known about how feedback actually affects students’ individual content specific learning processes and conceptual development. A theoretical framework based on Rabardel’s theory of the instrument and Vergnaud’s theory of conceptual fields is developed to study qualitatively how feedback actually functions in the learning process. This framework was applied in a case study of two elementary school students’ learning processes when working on a probability task from a German 3rd grade digital textbook. The analysis allowed detailed reconstruction of how students made sense of the information provided by the feedback and adjusted their behavior accordingly. This in-depth analysis unveiled that feedback does not necessarily foster conceptual development in the desired way, and a correct solution does not always coincide with conceptual understanding. The results point to some obstacles that students face when working individually on tasks from digital mathematics textbooks with automated feedback, and indicate that feedback needs to be developed in design-based research cycles in order to yield the desired effects.

与传统方法相比，数字数学教科书最普遍的功能之一就是对学生的解决方案提供自动反馈。由于反馈被认为是影响学习的重要因素，因此通常将其视为数字数学教科书的一部分。一般而言，虽然有大量关于反馈有效性的定量研究，但对于反馈实际上如何影响学生的特定内容的学习过程和概念发展的了解很少。建立了基于拉巴德尔的仪器理论和维格纳德的概念领域理论的理论框架，以定性研究反馈在学习过程中的实际作用。这个框架被用于两个小学生在学习德国三年级数字教科书中的概率任务时的学习过程的案例研究。通过分析，可以详细重建学生如何理解反馈所提供的信息，并相应地调整其行为。这项深入的分析表明，反馈并不一定以期望的方式促进概念的发展，正确的解决方案并不总是与概念的理解相吻合。结果指出了学生在单独处理带有自动反馈的数字数学教科书中的任务时面临的一些障碍，并表明需要在基于设计的研究周期中开发反馈，以产生理想的效果。