Abstract:

The increasing complexity of educational innovation requires tools capable of capturing not only the presence of innovative practices, but also their degree of organisational integration and cultural consolidation within schools. To address this need at scale, INDIRE (the Italian the National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research) has developed Reflex, a data-driven digital system that supports Italian schools in monitoring and self-assessing their innovation processes through a structured, repeatable, and technologically enhanced workflow.

Reflex operationalises two complementary constructs of innovation: systematisation, an organisational process governed by school leadership, and rooting, a socio-cultural process involving the teaching community. These constructs are mapped onto ten innovation dimensions - derived from and extended beyond the DigCompOrg framework - covering leadership, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, collaboration, internationalisation, well-being, professional development, learning environments, and time organisation.

The system consists of two parallel online questionnaires (32 items each), designed respectively for the school leadership team and for all teachers. Each item is operationalised through phase-based response models derived from social innovation theory and diffusion-of-innovation models. This enables Reflex to generate structured, comparable indicators at different levels of granularity.

The system is based on the administration of two similar online questionnaires (32 questions each), one designed for school management and the other for all teachers. The questions, derived from social innovation theory and innovation diffusion models, use the same Likert scale and are divided by individual dimension. This allows Reflex to generate structured and comparable indicators at different levels of aggregation: at the level of individual respondents, as an average of all respondents, for each dimension, as an average of all dimensions.

A key technological component of Reflex is its analytics and reporting infrastructure, built on Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft’s business intelligence platform. Power BI is used to create dynamic dashboards that allow you to view and filter the following three indicators:
- Systematisation Index: a progress-based indicator representing the school’s organisational phase, measured on a five-level scale (from problem definition to dissemination);
- Rooting Index: a distribution of teachers across five progressive levels of adoption (from knowledge to confirmation), including a reliability indicator based on response rates;
- Multidimensional Radar Chart: a dual visualisation of systematisation and rooting across the ten innovation dimensions, enabling diagnostic comparison and longitudinal tracking.

The integration of Power BI allows Reflex to offer automated data ingestion, real-time recalculation of indicators, advanced data visualisation, and scalable deployment across thousands of schools. The architecture is designed for periodic administration, ensuring that each school can analyse trends over time and detect alignment or divergence between organisational intent and community-level adoption.

Currently in pilot testing with more than 100 Italian schools, Reflex will be deployed nationally in early 2026.

Keywords:

Technology, education, systematization, school, self-assessment, data-driven, decision-making.