Assessment of democratic competencies can include many different approaches. In the Horizon Democrat project, a new competence model for responsible democratic citizenship was developed, focusing on four key competencies: participation, deliberation, judgment and critical thinking, and democratic resilience (Toscano et al, 2023). Based on that, an assessment and evaluation model (strategy and tools) was co-created in a Living Lab setting (Schuurmann, 2015) and adapted in various contexts, offering more profound insight into usefulness and effectiveness, aiming to identify the more promising strategies and tools to be adopted in a broader scale. In the initial development phase of the assessment model and tools, we drew from the logic of the newly created Democrat model, Bloom’s and SOLO taxonomies (İlhan & Gezer, 2017), and the reference framework of competences for democratic culture (Council of Europe, 2021). The model included first developing more elaborate descriptors for the four competence areas. These descriptors differentiated into four levels: minimal, basic, intermediate, and advanced. Various instruments were also created, such as an assessment table for teachers/practitioners and student self-assessment forms. These were combined with evaluation strategies such as research diaries and focus groups. The national teams were then instructed to adapt this model and the instruments within the national living lab settings based on contextual needs, such as the age of participants, types of interventions, preferences of practitioners, etc. but keeping the overall logic of the assessment, including the four competence areas and four levels. In this presentation, we will focus on how such a co-creative approach worked (drawing from the Deweyan perspective of democracy as practice and the participatory action research logic within a living lab setting) for developing an assessment model and instruments, e.g. whether the way it was set up allowed for sufficient co-development, how the practitioners and national teams adapted the model and tools, how much collaboration there was in and between organizations etc. The insights are based on the written material and artifacts gathered, notes from meetings, workshops, and one-to-one communication, and interviews with teams of the Democrat National Living Lab. Learning is linked to knowledge from previous research on co-creation, research-practice partnerships, and the knowledge appropriation model (Ley et al., 2022) as well as research on the assessment of citizenship competencies (e.g. Daas, 2019; Daas et al., 2023; Waatainen & Chu, 2024).

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