Designing mathematical tasks to promote students’ interaction

In this paper we aim at identifying the tasks, posted online by a teacher, that occasion more students’ interactions than others, namely threads for which a larger number of students posted more comments on line with respect to other threads, where fewer students posted less comments. Being explorative, our study considers a varied set of tasks in terms of topic, length and being procedural or conceptual. To analyse the data, we resort to the methods provided by the most recent advances in network analysis. The results allow us to pinpoint a tentative list of characteristics of tasks that promote online interaction, and at the same time we identify subgroups of tasks that attract students with different preferences and behaviour.