Lecturers in Denmark are utilizing apps to audit their college students’ moods

In a Copenhagen suburb, a fifth-grade classroom is having its weekly cake-eating session, a typical custom in Danish public colleges. Whereas the kids are consuming chocolate cake, the trainer pulls up an infographic on a whiteboard: a bar chart generated by a digital platform that collects knowledge on how they’ve been feeling. Organized to show the classroom’s weekly “temper panorama,” the info exhibits that the category averaged a temper of 4.Four out of 5, and the kids rated their household life extremely. “That’s nice!” the trainer exclaims, elevating two thumbs up within the air. 

She then strikes to an infographic on sleep hygiene. Right here the info exhibits the scholars struggling, and the trainer invitations them to consider methods to enhance their sleeping habits. After briefly speaking amongst themselves, the kids counsel “much less display time at night time,” “meditation earlier than sleep,” and “having a sizzling tub.” They collectively make a dedication to implement these methods. At subsequent week’s cake time, they are going to be requested whether or not or not they adopted via. 

These types of data-driven well-­being audits have gotten increasingly more widespread in Denmark’s lecture rooms. The nation has lengthy been a pacesetter in on-line companies and infrastructure, rating as probably the most digitally developed nation within the UN’s e-government survey. Lately its colleges, too, have acquired large investments in this kind of expertise: it’s estimated that the Danish authorities allotted $Four to $eight million, a fourth of the highschool funds for educating aids, to procuring digital platforms in 2018. In 2021, it invested some $7 million extra.  

These investments are rooted in a Nordic custom of schooling that facilities the kid’s expertise and encourages interactive studying; some Scandinavian schooling researchers suppose expertise will help draw kids in as playful, energetic individuals. “Know-how is an prolonged pencil and drawing pad. It’s a software that’s sure to the kid’s alternative to precise themselves,” Mari-Ann Letnes, an schooling scientist in Norway, stated in a 2018 interview. In a 2019 standing report on using expertise in colleges, the Danish Ministry of Training said that “creativity and self-expression with digital applied sciences are part of constructing college students’ motivation and versatile growth.” Now, some academics and directors are hoping expertise can be utilized to sort out psychological well being as nicely.

Danish schoolchildren are within the midst of a mental-health disaster that one of many nation’s largest political events has known as a problem “equal to inflation, the environmental disaster, and nationwide safety.” Nobody is aware of why, however in just some a long time, the variety of Danish kids and youth with melancholy has greater than sextupled. One-quarter of ninth graders report that they’ve tried self-harm. (The issue isn’t unique to Denmark: depressive episodes amongst US teenagers elevated by some 60% between 2007 and 2017, and teenage suicide charges have additionally leaped by round 60% over the identical interval.) A latest open letter signed by greater than 1,000 Danish college psychologists expressed “severe considerations” over the psychological state of the kids they see of their work and warned that if motion isn’t taken instantly, they “see no hope for turning the unfavourable development round.” 

To assist tackle the issue, some Danish colleges are shifting to handle kids’s well-being via platforms like Woof, the one used within the fifth-grade classroom. Constructed by a Denmark-based startup, it regularly surveys schoolchildren on quite a lot of well-being indicators and makes use of an algorithm to counsel specific points for the category to deal with. 

These platforms are rapidly gaining floor. Woof, for instance, has been carried out in lecture rooms in additional than 600 colleges throughout Denmark, with extra on the way in which. Its founders consider Woof fills an necessary area of interest: they are saying academics have expressed widespread dissatisfaction with present instruments, particularly a government-run well-being survey. That survey audits colleges every year and delivers outcomes on a delay; it would present a snapshot for policymakers however is hardly helpful for academics, who want common suggestions to regulate their work.

“There’s merely a necessity for instruments to test in [with the children] the place you don’t have to be energetic,” says Mathias Probst, a cofounder of Woof. “The place you don’t want to speak to all 24 kids earlier than beginning a category, as a result of earlier than it, 15 minutes of sophistication time has already handed.” And academics may benefit, he suggests, from “one thing that may deliver an information construction into all of this.” 

Woof just isn’t alone in its try to quantify kids’s moods. A handful of different platforms have been adopted by Danish colleges, and colleges in Finland and the UK are utilizing mood-monitoring software program as nicely. Within the US, the tech can lengthen past amassing self-reports to attempting to find hints of regarding habits by surveilling college students’ emails, chat messages, and searches on school-issued units. 

Quite a few individuals say mood-­monitoring tech has nice potential. “We are able to use digital instruments to judge well-­being on a 24-hour foundation. How is the sleep? How is the bodily exercise, how is the interplay with others? … How does [the child’s] display time examine to bodily time? That’s central to understanding what well-being truly is,” the late Carsten Obel, who was a professor of public well being at Aarhus College and a pacesetter within the growth of one other student-surveying software known as Moods, stated in a 2019 video. 

However some specialists are closely skeptical of the method. They are saying there may be little proof that quantification of this type can be utilized to unravel social issues, and that fostering a behavior of self-surveillance from an early age might basically alter kids’s relationship to themselves and one another in a manner that makes them really feel worse fairly than higher. “We are able to hardly go to a restaurant or to the theater with out being requested how we really feel about it afterwards and ticking containers right here and there,” says Karen Vallgårda, an affiliate professor on the College of Copenhagen who research household and childhood historical past. “There’s a quantification of feelings and experiences that’s rising, and it’s necessary that we ask ourselves whether or not that’s the best method relating to kids’s well-being.”

Others are asking how a lot kids and their mother and father truly find out about what knowledge is being collected—and the way it’s getting used. Whereas some platforms say they’re amassing minimal or no personally identifiable knowledge, others mine deep into particular person kids’s psychological states, bodily exercise, and even pal teams. 

“Their follow could be very Silicon Valley–like. They preach knowledge transparency however have none themselves,” says Jesper Balslev, a analysis marketing consultant on the Copenhagen Faculty of Design and Know-how, of a few of these platforms. Balslev says he’s involved that Woof and different platforms are being swiftly and naively rolled out with out sufficient regulation, testing, or efforts to be sure that the college tradition permits kids to abstain from taking part in them. “Our regulatory applied sciences to take care of this are horrible,” he says. It’s attainable that may change, he provides, “however proper now, all of the hobs are turned on on the identical time.” 


Woof is run from a basement workplace on the outskirts of Copenhagen, with a small crew of three full-time staffers. The founders, Mathias Probst and Amalie Danckert, acquired the thought for the corporate after working as public college academics via Educate First Denmark, a corporation just like Educate for America in america. 

When Probst and Danckert entered the general public college system, they are saying, they rapidly realized that colleges in low-income neighborhoods face a vicious cycle. Tough circumstances at residence could make college students in these colleges tougher to show. Workers turnover charges are excessive due to stress and burnout, with some academics eager to change to “simpler” colleges. Mother and father with assets usually take their kids elsewhere, so youngsters with extra issues make up a good higher proportion of those that stay, exacerbating the stress academics face and the probability that they’ll go away. All this compounds the well-being disaster that kids are experiencing elsewhere. 

“I noticed so many kids ending up in troublesome conditions, which might have been prevented if motion had been taken earlier,” says Danckert, who earlier than her stint as a trainer labored as an analyst within the kids and youth part of Copenhagen’s Social Companies Administration.

Danckert and Probst, who has a background in consulting, got down to construct a manner to assist colleges handle such conditions earlier than they spiral into severe mental-health issues—issues that colleges’ thinly stretched counseling methods could not catch till it’s too late.

Woof, the answer they devised, is an online app that kids can entry on computer systems or telephones (a 2019 examine discovered that 98% of Danish kids between 10 and 15 have entry to a smartphone). Its person interface primarily encompasses a cartoon canine, which asks the kids varied questions on their life. The software is designed for use on a weekly foundation, producing a “temper panorama” for the category by prompting youngsters to charge their temper and different elements of their lives on a 1–5 scale. The result’s supposed so as to add as much as a complete picture of kid welfare in that classroom over time. 

Lecturers and administrative employees can learn weekly studies on a category’s general self-reported temper and the way components like  their sleep hygiene, social exercise, educational efficiency, and bodily exercise have an effect on that temper. Lecture rooms are profiled, and interventions are advisable to enhance the scores in classes the place they’re doing much less nicely. Lastly, the trainer and the kids have a look at the info collectively and assist one another with instruments and techniques to enhance these sticking factors. 

“It’s worrying that there’s a lot personally attributable knowledge on platforms working with kids.”

Mathias Probst, a cofounder of Woof

Woof’s knowledge is anonymized; the app studies on classroom averages as an alternative of particular person kids. Danckert says that’s as a result of the corporate was unwilling to stroll proper as much as the sting of what was legally and ethically possible underneath knowledge privateness legal guidelines. Probst additionally describes feeling uneasy that amassing knowledge on particular person kids would possibly create a story and lock them into it, fairly than serving to them break unfavourable patterns. “It’s worrying that there’s a lot personally attributable knowledge on platforms working with kids,” he says.

The startup totally launched Woof lower than a 12 months in the past, within the fall of 2022. In keeping with beta take a look at knowledge collected on 30 colleges earlier than its full launch, 80% of courses that use Woof see temper enhance by, on common, 0.35 factors on the 1–5 scale inside one month. Woof maintains that the platform isn’t meant to interchange teacher-student contact. It ought to fairly be understood as a assist software for academics that gives structured motion plans and suggestions. 

surveilllance of child at school desk concept

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However some specialists have doubts about whether or not Woof’s strategies are efficient. They’re notably skeptical in regards to the self-reported nature of the platform’s knowledge. 

In keeping with Balslev, schooling apps haven’t proved that they carry out any higher than analog interventions, resembling having academics advise kids to show off their computer systems and ask them how they slept final night time. He factors to historic classes, resembling a 2015 OECD examine discovering that digitalization in colleges in quite a lot of nations had exacerbated a spread of issues it was supposed to enhance, with a internet unfavourable impact on studying outcomes.

“We intuitively belief knowledge or the quantitative regime greater than we belief people,” he says. “I’ve discovered no, or only a few, research that study using ed tech in managed environments.” 

And there may be good purpose to take self-reported well-being knowledge with warning: kids might not be offering trustworthy data. Balslev claims that when expertise is launched right into a social context, it might’t be assumed that college students will show excellent habits and cooperate with its intentions. For instance, in interviews he has completed with highschool college students, he says they’ve reported gaming digital methods to do issues like get extra time for an task or make a writing train look longer than it truly is.  

Although dishonest solutions are in fact attainable, Probst and Danckert argue that Woof’s nameless method makes genuine responses extra seemingly than they is likely to be in any other case. “Many college students from low-­earnings areas are very conscious of whether or not they’re nameless or not. And they’re very conscious of what’s disclosed about their household life,” says Danckert. “The scholars don’t wish to speak about what is occurring at residence, as a result of they’re fearful that it’ll begin a case [with a social services agency],” Probst provides. He and Danckert consider that the nameless method builds belief and promotes trustworthy disclosure, as college students can make sure that it gained’t set off the trainer’s authorized obligation to report purple flags additional up within the system. 


Woof isn’t the one well-being platform making inroads in Danish colleges. Platforms like Bloomsights, Moods, and Klassetrivsel (Danish for “classroom well-being”) are additionally getting traction. Every takes a extra data-­intensive and fewer nameless method than Woof, monitoring and figuring out schoolchildren individually. Bloomsights and Klassetrivsel even go so far as producing “sociograms”—community diagrams that show the kids’s relationships with one another intimately. 

Bloomsights turns self-reported knowledge from the identical people over time into indicators together with “indicators of loneliness,” “educational mindset,” and “indicators of bullying.” Bloomsights can also be used within the US, the place some college districts are together with it as a part of an “early warning system” for figuring out potential college shooters. 

The corporate’s US operations are primarily based in Colorado. Cofounder Adam Rockenbach says the hope in bringing Bloomsights to the US was to unfold the Scandinavian values of well-being and group. He asserts that the app just isn’t meant to be a dystopian “Huge Brother” however an extension of what academics already do. 

“You discover the coed is coming into class, and possibly they’re coming to class late extra regularly than earlier than, and so they look somewhat raveled,” he says. “An excellent trainer goes to go discover two or three minutes to attach with that pupil: ‘Hey, it looks as if there’s one thing off right here. Is there any manner I will help you?’”

Citing his experiences as a trainer in inner-city colleges in Los Angeles for six years, Rockenbach says it may be a problem to know what is actually occurring with kids who wrestle in an surroundings that is likely to be marked by gang violence and poverty. He says Bloomsights will help in conditions the place the indicators aren’t so clear.

Rockenbach believes that nameless knowledge solely makes early intervention harder, because it creates extra work for academics and educators in making an attempt to establish who has issues and wishes assist. Because of this, he thinks amassing particular person knowledge is a necessity.

This system, which operates via an online app, takes self-reporting measurements just like Woof’s: month-to-month surveys of scholars, measuring varied indicators of psychological and bodily well-being and college students’ analysis of their studying surroundings. 

However Bloomsights stands out in its use of sociograms, that are constructed from the scholars’ studies of who their buddies are and who they join and spend time with.

Rockenbach says these sociograms are essential instruments to detect social isolation and would possibly even assist establish kids who’re susceptible to bullying. He factors to testimonial studies from colleges as an indicator that the platform helps enhance well-being. However, he provides, “we haven’t carried out a full-on analysis undertaking which may examine, for instance, a college that makes use of Bloomsights versus a college that doesn’t. That’s one thing that we’re seeking to do.”

Certainly, some academics marvel how helpful—and even moral—the app is. “It’s some very intimate issues which can be requested, and so they [the children] don’t essentially know who’s going to see it,” says Naya Marie Nord, a trainer at a suburban Copenhagen college that makes use of Bloomsights. “After all, I as a trainer ought to have perception into how my college students are feeling. However that’s one thing that I want to have conveyed within the confidentiality between me and the coed, fairly than it being instructed to a pc.” Nord is worried about what number of academics who don’t work straight with the kids nonetheless have entry to their knowledge. She believes the app straddles moral boundaries given how a lot it impinges on college students’ non-public lives. 

“They don’t have any likelihood of understanding what’s going on. It’s not like we give them an extended presentation explaining the way it’s used and who has entry [to the data],” Nord says. “And if we did, we might get no trustworthy solutions. If they really understood the quantity of knowledge I can see about them and what number of others can see it as nicely, I consider they’d reply in another way.”

In keeping with the info insurance policies of Klassetrivsel, one of many platforms that accumulate non-anonymized knowledge, consent just isn’t required from both mother and father or kids earlier than the app is used within the classroom. The corporate claims that for the reason that app is an built-in software used for “well-being functions” at a public establishment, it falls underneath a Danish authorized clause that exempts public authorities from necessities about acquiring consent for knowledge assortment. And for the reason that platforms aren’t categorised as “data society companies” like Fb or Google, there isn’t any parental consent required underneath the Normal Information Safety Regulation, the European Union’s sweeping knowledge privateness regulation. 

Authorized precedents appear to again up Klassetrivsel’s claims about how the info regulation applies to its work. In 2019, a mum or dad submitted a grievance to the Danish Information Safety Company, claiming {that a} data-driven well-being platform at her little one’s college was partaking in compelled monitoring of the kid. The mum or dad additional argued that “measuring and monitoring well-being just isn’t the identical as enhancing well-being.” The company dominated in favor of the college’s municipality: the app was deemed a software for sustaining duties of “essential social curiosity” that fall underneath the accountability of colleges.

“Normally, the authorized authority that these third-party apps function underneath is that they’re providing a service on behalf of the general public authorities,” says Allan Frank, an IT lawyer on the company. However they have to nonetheless retailer knowledge accurately and never accumulate greater than is important. They need to additionally function underneath the aegis of governmental authorization, he says: “If there’s a random trainer or a college that has been satisfied to all of the sudden set it up with out the supervision of the municipality or the Ministry of Training, then that will be an issue.”

In Denmark, mother and father can decide out in the event that they don’t need knowledge collected on their kids via these apps. In keeping with Bloomsights, that is additionally the case within the US: though practices fluctuate, Rockenbach says that folks sometimes signal a paper every year that lists all of the totally different companies the college makes use of. 

However as a result of the apps are utilized in an academic context and are framed as altruistic, each mother and father and policymakers are inclined to have their guard down. “There are lots of different apps the place I restrict my son’s use, however I’m not involved about apps used within the college the identical manner I’m about TikTok and YouTube, for instance,” says Janni Hindborg Christiansen, mom of one of many kids within the fifth-grade classroom that makes use of Woof. “Not less than Woof is utilized in a managed surroundings and has a great function. I belief it greater than so many different apps that I’d be extra vital towards.”

And for fogeys who don’t need their kids utilizing such platforms, opting out just isn’t at all times simple. 

Henriette Viskum, the trainer of the fifth-grade class, describes Woof classes as part of her class’s core programming, identical to math, and says mother and father want to speak with the trainer to drag their little one out of this system. “If it’s an enormous downside, we’ll discover a answer after which the kid doesn’t need to take part,” Viskum says. “However then I might, as a trainer, put a giant query mark round why the mother and father are so strongly against working with well-being. I might be a bit involved and interested by that.” 

The closeness between academics and college students may also make the diploma of anonymity blurry. Viskum instructed me that if virtually a complete class studies excessive scores on household life, for instance, however one little one doesn’t, she will often intuit who that individual is and would possibly casually attempt to take steps to assist.


For Balslev, the embrace of slick data-driven options is due partly to their political enchantment. In Denmark, expertise typically tends to be offered as the answer to every thing related to educating and schooling. The easy infographics that ed-tech corporations supply, he says, have an attract for presidency officers confronted with thorny social and pedagogical points.

“What’s unbelievable in regards to the digital [initiatives] is that they’re good at making politicians look actionable—as if they’ve made some selections,” Balslev says. 

However efficacy just isn’t as a lot of a precedence, he says: “It’s fast and straightforward to supply some metrics that seem rhetorically convincing. The infographic would possibly present a really skinny sliver of reality about actuality, however it doesn’t contact the core of the scenario.”

“The infographic would possibly present a really skinny sliver of reality about actuality, however it doesn’t contact the core of the scenario.”

Jesper Balslev, analysis marketing consultant on the Copenhagen Faculty of Design and Know-how

Actually, the expertise dangers truly making the scenario worse, says Karen Vallgårda, the College of Copenhagen researcher. She is worried that the “surveillance paradigm” might have unintended penalties for youngsters’s self-understanding. 

“If we’re requested to observe ourselves in keeping with a quantitative logic, feelings resembling indignation and sorrow can seem as problematic emotional reactions, even supposing they’re utterly pure in sure situations of life. The kids can really feel that what they’re feeling is improper or undesirable, which is prone to propel higher well-­being points fairly than ameliorating them,” Vallgårda says.

“After we instill a measure of self-­surveillance with kids primarily based on a clearly communicated excellent of the right way to construction one’s on a regular basis life, one’s consuming habits, and the right way to really feel in sure contexts, there’s a danger that kids develop ‘double unhappiness’ as a result of not simply being sad but in addition failing to reside as much as these beliefs.”

Vallgårda’s considerations are echoed by different researchers, who argue that an extreme deal with whether or not kids are completely satisfied may cause them to pathologize regular fluctuations in life. New research additionally point out that declining well-being is essentially attributed to environmental and social pressures fairly than particular person components.

Vallgårda believes that fairly than pouring assets into instruments that additional a quantitative agenda, colleges ought to as an alternative be prioritizing efforts to rent and practice professionals like academics and college psychologists.

However digital platforms are considerably cheaper than hiring or coaching extra individuals. Viskum, the fifth-grade trainer, factors out that budgets are tight and ready lists for appointments with the college psychologist are miles lengthy. Given the fabric actuality, the enchantment of ed tech is comprehensible, even when there are few outcomes to again it up. 

Whereas the quantification of youngsters’s lives would possibly make lecturers balk, the kids I met instructed me that they loved utilizing Woof and particularly favored how the app helped them speak extra properly to one another. At a college I visited in a low-income neighborhood (the category scored 3.Four on the temper scale), a trainer stated she was simply completely satisfied to have a software which may give her a basic concept of what was occurring with the kids.

Once I requested Woof’s Probst about Vallgårda’s criticisms, he stated that not like researchers learning kids academically, those that work with kids on daily basis within the classroom can’t afford to suppose in summary phrases. 

“It’s all nicely and good to be a theorist and have the opinion that you simply shouldn’t be doing sure issues, however there may be additionally a actuality on the market within the lecture rooms,” he says. “There’s a sensible scenario the place academics face kids who’re struggling a lot that they break down in tears throughout class. You need to do one thing there.” 

Arian Khameneh is a contract journalist primarily based in Copenhagen.

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