The French Ministry of Education Partners with Canadian-based Ed Tech Company, Vretta, to Deploy Large-Scale Interactive Assessments

The Division of Evaluation, Planning and Performance (DEPP) at the French Ministry of Education has awarded Vretta the contract to deploy large-scale interactive assessments for their national tests at primary schools in France.

TORONTO, March 30, 3017 /PRNewswire/ - Ministries of education, across the world, share a common belief that digitization is the future direction of large-scale student assessments. This is a vision that is also strongly shared by the leadership teams at the French Ministry of Education who run several sample-based, large-scale assessments to evaluate the literacy and numeracy of students in primary and secondary schools across France.

Since 2014, the Division of Evaluation, Planning and Performance (DEPP) at the French Ministry of Education has piloted and implemented digital assessments for their national tests conducted in secondary schools. However, as is typical in most countries, infrastructure and the availability of devices is much stronger in secondary schools than in primary schools. This led the DEPP to carefully consider the new challenges they would face when extending digital assessments in primary schools.

In 2016, the DEPP, in partnership with Vretta, designed and developed a mobile assessment platform, which could be run in an offline environment, with about 300 interactive assessment items in Mathematics and French. Voice-enabled tutorials, custom tools, interactions, and questionnaires were also developed within the platform to engage and guide students through the assessment experience. A custom data structure was also created to allow for the offline collection of data. The application was successfully used by over 3 000 students at 100 schools, in partnership with l'Académie de Versailles, France. The navigation tools and tutorials guided students through the interactive assessments, and the built-in surveys demonstrated that students found the experience to be highly positive.

Dr. Thierry Rocher, Head of Office for Student Assessment at the DEPP stated, "This project has confirmed that large-scale interactive assessments benefit greatly when presented on mobile devices." He added, "The success of this pilot also provides great promise for digital assessments administered in an offline environment."

Based on the success of this pilot, through a request for proposal, the French Ministry of Education awarded Vretta the contract for the deployment of the assessments across all primary schools in the country. Currently, the teams at the DEPP and Vretta are collaborating for the official launch of the large-scale assessment on tablets, in an offline environment, across France.

Click here to learn more about the partnership between the DEPP and Vretta on the deployment.

ABOUT VRETTA

Vretta is a global education technology company that is transforming the way students engage with mathematics. Vretta's team of learning and assessment specialists design and develop award-winning interactive math resources that are re-defining what really matters for students in the 21^st century, making sure that every student acquires meaningful quantitative skills that will serve them in their lives and professions. Vretta's vision is a world where everyone enjoys mathematics and they are achieving this by pushing the boundaries of technology to inspire and empower every learner in the world. To learn more about Vretta, visit www.vretta.com.

SOURCE Vretta Inc.