Developing a formative, digital tool to assess children’s number sense when starting school

Abstract

We investigate how digital technologies can enrich teachers’ formative assessment of number sense by describing the development process of a digital assessment tool for children starting school (fiveand six-year-olds). Studying different aspects of validity, we focus on scoring and digital affordances. The quantitative analysis of the preliminary data from 101 children evidences the technical validity of the tool. We find that interactive assessment items add to the content validity of the tool. The interactive items provide qualitative data about students’ number sense which cannot be captured by quantitative measures. At the same time, children may have greater difficulty interpreting more complex items. Our results support the view that a digital tool can be a useful supplement to the assessment of number sense. Further developments and approaches to investigating additional aspects of validity are discussed.