There are a multitude of tools for conducting assessment in physical education, but not all are applicable to the field of physical education. In this article, we will analyze some of the most outstanding and useful ones for the field of assessment in physical education.
What is assessment?
Assessment in physical education is a teaching task that consists of valuing the knowledge, performance, and attitude of a student in this subject and should be understood as a planned process, through which information is obtained through a series of instruments, which allow issuing a judgment based on established criteria to subsequently make decisions that improve educational activity.
It is important to assess in all areas as it is the way to improve, realize mistakes, and in the future, improve weak points.
Assessment in physical education is a teaching task that consists of valuing the knowledge, performance, and attitude of a student in this subject and should be understood as a planned process
Assessment tools in physical education
These are some of the most commonly used assessment tools in the field of physical education:
Exams or assessment in physical education
The most traditional way to conduct assessment in physical education is through theoretical exams, which help us verify knowledge and see if learning is effective. However, a good teacher should not stop here and must go much further, as there are many areas that need to be assessed, and with theoretical exams alone, we cannot encompass all of them.
Assessment rubric in physical education
Rubrics are measurement instruments in which criteria and standards are established by levels, through the arrangement of scales, allowing to determine the quality of students’ performance in specific tasks. (Vera Vélez, 2008).
Among its advantages, it should be noted that the student already knows what is being assessed and is aware of it. It can be done in pairs or groups, and the students themselves can assess each other to try to enhance learning.
The most notable advantage that rubrics offer is that the student can identify firsthand the mistakes of their peers, thus focusing on not making the same ones, and the feedback they receive will be closer.
Class notebook
The student’s notebook is a learning and teacher-student dialogue instrument, used to develop a formative and integrative assessment in physical education.
It can be a great tool for conducting a follow-up of practical activity and ensuring the student is always ”up to date” in the subject and a different form of communication with the teacher.
Questionnaire: Likert scale
It is a psychometric scale commonly used in questionnaires, known as a summative scale because the score is obtained by summing the responses obtained for each item.
It allows us to measure attitudes and know the degree of agreement of the student with any statement we propose. It is especially useful to use it in situations where we want to know the students’ opinion.
An example would be the following, marking 1 if you totally disagree and 5 if you totally agree with the proposed statement:
Concept map
A concept map is a scheme of ideas through which different concepts and their relationships can be easily represented. The concepts have a hierarchical order among them and are connected by lines identified by linking words, which establish the relationship between them.
A concept map represents information. The errors that appear in concept maps serve to identify mistakes in the concepts and their connections.
The objective of a concept map is to achieve meaning through links that are easily analyzed.
Concept maps promote meaningful learning and can also be used to measure the expression ability of the student.
Below, we can see an example of a concept map about basketball:
Virtual tools for conducting assessment in physical education
With the advancement and introduction of ICT in teaching, there is no choice but to familiarize ourselves with them, as they offer us a multitude of advantages, help to promote student motivation, and foster creativity among others.
These tools can be used by the teacher, posing the tests or assigning the task to the students to prepare them themselves.
Among the simplest virtual tools are Google Forms, Kahoot, PlayPosit, Plickers, or Socrative among others.
These tools allow us to obtain instant information, for example, after a class, we can conduct a Kahoot or ask them to answer a Google form. Kahoot promotes participation during the class and helps keep the student attentive to the session. Additionally, with these tools, we can instantly verify if the class has been effective from the point of learning.
It is true that in certain cases, there are tools that will be unfeasible to use because we will not have the necessary resources, although conducting a Google form after class is very simple, providing us with interesting information and being practically viable everywhere.
In short, they are the same tools that have been traditionally used, but from a much more innovative approach, which facilitates learning and contributes to the motivation of students for the subject.
Shared assessment in physical education
We will analyze below the formative and shared assessment model in physical education, as there are multiple models and instruments of assessment in physical education, but how do we know which method is correct or most beneficial for the teaching-learning process? This article will refer to an innovative model far from the traditional.
The global term of assessment in physical education should be directly associated with learning, having to endow this process with full intentionality during the teaching-learning process, being one of the most complex problems in classroom pedagogical practice.
As Chiappe, Pinto, and Arias (2016) indicate, everything that can be graded should be assessable, but not everything assessable has to be gradable. Considering that we already have the duty to grade for legal reasons, we must do so by guaranteeing coherent prior evaluative conditions (Hortigüela, Pérez-Pueyo, and Abella, 2015a).
Here opens a field full of endless possibilities; how do we want someone to truly engage in something if they cannot influence the learning process? or how do we want the student to be fully aware of what they learn? highlighting that if we really want to endow students with autonomy, self-regulation of work, responsibility, or motivate them, we can allow them to participate in the assessment as a factor that supports the process itself.
What is shared assessment in physical education?
The term of formative and shared assessment in physical education has been changing over the years. However, according to (Minedu, 2019, p. 17), we can define this methodology as a permanent and systematic process that seeks to collect and process information in detail to know, analyze, and assess student learning, and based on this, provide feedback on their learning and make immediate decisions to improve the teacher’s pedagogical practice.
Basically, it consists of giving the student a voice in their assessment process in physical education, with the teacher guiding, orienting, and correcting the errors that the student has.
Hamodi, Pastor & Pastor (2015) argue this with the following example:
A chef wants their diners to be nourished, but mainly to enjoy their menu and savor it, just as a teacher wants their students to pass but above all, to learn and internalize the content given during the long learning process for their professional future.
To do this, while cooking, the chef tastes the food and corrects or improves the ingredients, putting in the effort so that the final dish is right for their diners.
This process is based on a formative assessment, just as the teacher works hard to correct student errors, regulate them, and redirect their learning in the most efficient way.
Advantages and disadvantages of shared assessment in physical education
Like everything in general, this methodology has a series of advantages and disadvantages that we reveal in this section.
We will start with a series of fundamental aspects or advantages that show the need to apply formative assessment processes.
- Allows being more aware of what is learned, highlighting that there is no learning if there is no prior awareness of what is being worked on.
- Ability to self-regulate learning, endowing students with responsibility and the teacher with the assumption of responsibilities towards work, something inseparable from school success, which also favors individualized attention and subsequent intervention towards special educational needs.
- Different abilities and competencies during learning, being one of our main tasks as teachers to turn abilities into competencies.
- Diversity among feedback channels, allowing each student to give constructive evaluations both in their work and that of others.
- Improvement of teaching practice.
On the other hand, we find a series of common mistakes or disadvantages in this regard, to consider.
- Mixing formative assessment in physical education with continuous assessment, as these are different criteria that are often confused.
- Understanding that the teacher is not the only one who can provide feedback.
- Need to establish criteria of responsibility from the start.
- Establishing the importance of feedback, not allowing task submissions before it.
- Not guaranteeing the transition to grading in a pedagogical manner, establishing responsibilities between students and teacher that are mutually reinforcing.
- Not associating assessment in physical education with instruments specific to it.
- Not using assessment in physical education as a purely grading end, but as a teaching-learning process.
Conclusions
Assessment in physical education should be seen as a resource to improve quality and learning in this area. To use one tool or another, we must analyze the feasibility of each one, considering many factors such as available resources, maturity level, knowledge level, and student responsibility, etc.
Assessment in physical education should be seen as a resource to improve quality and learning in this area.
The process of assessment in physical education will have a direct relationship with student learning, their involvement in the teaching-learning processes that take place, and academic performance and levels of school success, therefore, it is fundamental in the field of physical education.
After this review of the scientific literature, we can conclude that formative assessment requires changing traditional classroom practices, which is not an easy task, so it will be necessary to structure a set of guidelines capable of progressively achieving a change, impacting the student’s self-esteem and self-assessment directly with the evolution of their learning.
This assessment in physical education impacts the performance of the teaching-learning process, involving feedback and responsibility from both the teacher and the student to effectively internalize content.
Therefore, in formative assessment in physical education, students participate in their assessment, generating a transformation of evaluative practice in the improvement of learning with autonomy, reflective capacity, and self-regulation of work.
The process of assessment in physical education will have a direct relationship with student learning, their involvement in the teaching-learning processes that take place, and academic performance and levels of school success, therefore, it is fundamental in the field of physical education.
Below you can download two free ebooks on physical education.
Consulted bibliography
- Lucea, J. D. (2005). Formative assessment as a learning tool in physical education(Vol. 35). Inde.
- Martín, J. J. B., Aguado, R. M., García, J. G., Pastor, E. M. L., Pinela, J. F. M., Badiola, J. G., … & Martín, M. I. (2006). Assessment in physical education: review of traditional models and proposal of an alternative: formative and shared assessment. Challenges: new trends in physical education, sport, and recreation, (10), 31-41.
- Rosario, J. (2006). ICT: Its use as a tool for strengthening and developing virtual education. Didactics, innovation, and multimedia, (8), 000-0.
- Vera, L.F., Ibañez Hurtado, D. H., Giacomozzi Cuevas, D. A., Catalán Solis, Y. (2012). Comparative study: assessment instruments used by physical education teachers in secondary education in the city of Osorno. EFDeportes, Digital Magazine. Year 15, Nº174
- Linares, D., Pérez Cortés A. J., (2019). Subject Assessment in Physical Education, University of Granada.
- Tiching (2017). Blogtiching. Other ways to assess beyond the exam. Retrieved from http://blog.tiching.com/otras-formas-evaluar-mas-alla-del-examen/
- Alcalá, D. H., Pueyo, Á. P., & Calvo, G. G. (2019). But… what do we really mean by Formative and Shared Assessment?: Common Confusions and Practical Reflections. Ibero-American Journal of Educational Assessment, 12(1), 13-27.
- Bizarro, W., Sucari, W., & Quispe-Coaquira, A. (2019). Formative assessment within the framework of the competency-based approach. Innova Education Journal, 1(3), 374-390.
- Chiappe, A., Pinto, R. and Arias, V. (2016). Open Assessment of Learning: A Meta-Synthesis.
- International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 17(6), 44-61.
- Hamodi, C., Pastor, V. M. L., & Pastor, A. T. L. (2015). Means, techniques, and instruments of formative and shared assessment of learning in higher education. Educational Profiles, 37(147), 146-161.
- Minedu. (2019). Planning, mediation, and assessment of learning in Secondary Education. Lima.
Co-author | Alberto Yera. Graduate in Sports Sciences.
