DigiArvi

Introduction

The Research Institute for Learning Analytics (TRILA) of the University of Turku will begin developing a digital tool (DigiArvi) to support teachers’ year-level assessment. At the end of the school year, students will participate in a digital assessment of competence on school premises during a mathematics lesson, based on which teachers will receive student-specific feedback on their level of competence. When the student’s level of competence is compared to the national grade distribution of students and compared to all students who participated through the system. The feedback received by the teacher will also provide a rough estimate of what the student’s comparable grade would be. Development of the tool will begin for mathematics content in grades 3, 6, 8 and 9 in the spring of 2025. Within about three weeks, the teacher will receive a rough estimate of what the student’s grade would be based on how all participating students have performed in the assessment test. The municipality will receive feedback regarding its own schools in the autumn of 2025.

A tool to support teacher year-level assessment as part of the research and development of the ViLLE learning path system.

Information sessions

More information about the DigiArvi project

DigiArvi is part of TRILA’s ViLLE learning path system development and research project. The ViLLE learning environment is a Finnish digital learning environment widely used in Finland and over 50 countries. In Finland, ViLLE will be used in 70 percent of schools by 2024, and students will have solved 300 million tasks. Over 95% of these submissions are automatically assessed and feedback is given immediately. The system has received the UNESCO ICT Education Prize in 2021 and the UNICEF EdTech Prize in 2022.

The aim of the new project is to develop the ViLLE system so that it serves teachers and students, as well as municipal and national decision-making, in a more diverse and accurate way than before. As part of this, DigiArvi will also be developed to support teachers’ annual grade assessment. At the same time, we will collect information on the competence tasks used in the ViLLE system and their difficulty levels in the spring of 2025 and 2026. In addition, we will monitor how arithmetic and reading fluency develop and how the psychological factors related to these (such as motivation) change as competence develops during the ViLLE study path. When the difficulty levels of learning tasks are made comparable across grade levels, this will enable teachers to both monitor the development of a student’s competence more closely than before and to offer more group- and student-specific study paths and additional teaching modules for teachers and students.

The development and research project is implemented as a development cooperation between various municipalities and education providers and the University of Turku. The cooperation is coordinated by TRILA. The research group is called the TRILA consortium, and it includes both TRILA’s own researchers and researchers from other universities who have joined the TRILA consortium. The project is part of the EDUCA flagship project funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture.