Designing curriculum-aligned digital assessment infrastructures: a design-based case study of Naviskore in Flemish secondary education

Rony Moortgat, Shane Deconinck

Background Competency-based education requires assessment infrastructures that make evaluation evidence visible, curriculum-linked, and usable in professional deliberation. In Flanders, existing digital tools often remain fragmented across evaluation input, feedback, reporting, and high-stakes decision-making workflows. Purpose This article presents Naviskore as a design-based case study of a curriculum-aligned digital assessment infrastructure developed in Flemish secondary education. Rather than evaluating the platform’s impact on learning outcomes, fairness, workload, or assessment reliability, the study examines how iterative co-design with educators informed the development of infrastructural design principles for transparent, teacher-mediated assessment. Method Over four years, Naviskore was developed through iterative co-design, prototyping, implementation, and technical verification cycles involving teachers, school leaders, administrators, and IT staff. The analysis focuses on design artefacts, stakeholder feedback, platform features, and implementation experience. Results The case identifies five design principles: curriculum-embedded evaluation, structured multi-modal feedback, distributed professional agency, interpretability-by-design, and human-in-the-loop data infrastructure. Implementation across four schools and more than two million evaluation records demonstrates practical adoption and infrastructural scale, but these data are not used to make causal, psychometric, or fairness-outcome claims. Conclusion The study contributes a theoretically informed design model for curriculum-aligned assessment infrastructures in competency-based education. It shows how digital assessment systems can be designed to support traceability, curriculum coherence, and teacher-led deliberation, while identifying the need for future empirical research on reliability, fairness, usability, workload, and educational impact.