Assessment in Physical Education

A Teacher's Guide to the Issues

Bob Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780750702980
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135720520
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the past, assessment was underplayed or neglected in the training of physical education teachers. Physical education lay, largely, outside of school's formal structures of assessment, and books on assessment completely ignored this area of the school curriculum. With the introduction of the GCSE, Routes of Assessment (ROA) and the National Curriculum, assessment has become an important part of the teaching of PE. This book examines in detail the issues as they affect teachers.

Chapter 1
What is This Thing Called ‘Assessment’ all About?

The Context

Indeed it would be no exaggeration to say that the 1980s have been the era of assessment-led education reform. (Hargreaves, 1989, p. 99)

Although assessment had often been the focus of educational debate and reform, for example, the 11+ examination, and the introduction of CSE, I think it is fair to say that assessment debate and reform had never been tackled on so many fronts, so continuously, so pervasively and so far reaching as those during the 1980s. During this period there had been three main initiatives and reform, the GCSE, Records Of Achievement (ROA) and the National Curriculum. There had been a long build-up to the amalgamation of the GCE and CSE to form the GCSE, and with it came more fundamental change from norm referencing to criterion referencing which has changed teachers’ thinking on testing in other situations and for all ages. At approximately the same time, Government pilot schemes of ROA were taking place because of the dissatisfaction with examination results and certificates, along with the oft discredited and non-compulsory school reports, as the only means of showing what had been achieved at school. But, of course, ROA does not just target the fifth year leaving pupil in that year. In future it will target the pupils’ achievement throughout the school years. After an ‘on-off’ situation, recording and reporting to parents finally became part of Government policy.

The most far reaching of all is, of course, the National Curriculum with its assessments at the end of four key stages (ages 7, 11, 14 and 16). There have been other initiatives too, such as CPVE and TVEI with their links to employment, modularization of courses with certification by examination groups and LEAs, and discussion on the reform of sixth form and advanced level courses. Post-16 and advanced level reform is likely to be the most controversial and heated debate of the early 1990s. However, the most contentious issues and heated debate in the pre-16 school years concern the assessments in the National Curriculum and these have occurred because of management problems and because of conflicting purposes and interests. These are issues which affect physical education no less than other subjects so will be themes which will be tackled in this book.

What all these initiatives have done is to bring assessment, which had always been at the heart of teaching, to the forefront of educational and political debate and policy. The reasons for this are complex and have been analyzed by Hargreaves (1989). He refers to the crisis of motivation. At the heart are the crises of confidence in standards and in the schools’ instrumental economic function of providing a suitable work force. What it means for teachers is that they have become much more involved in formal assessment techniques and procedures and need to have greater understanding of what is involved.

In the past, assessment debate and reform hardly touched PE directly. PE teachers were often left to their own devices in curriculum and assessment matters. Annual school reports with limited space for comment, and the selection of schools teams, were usually the only formal or open assessment which had to be made. It was not until the 1970s that some PE teachers became involved in examinations through the CSE, but it was the advent of the GCSE which brought substantial numbers of schools and PE teachers into the examination scene (Carroll, 1990a). Many more are about to become involved. Many PE teachers found that they had to get involved in assessment through ROA and many more will have to do so. Primary school teachers will have to get involved in ROA as, so far, few have done so (DES, 1991d) and this includes PE recording. The National Curriculum requirements will involve both primary and secondary teachers in the assessment of pupils in PE, recording that assessment at the end of the four key stages, and to carry out more formative assessments in between in accordance with the subject group's proposals (DES, 1991a) and statutory orders (DES, 1992). There is an increasing number of PE teachers involved in more specialist assessment through GCSE, ‘A’ level PE and Sport Studies, and BTEC Leisure Studies, at both theoretical and practical levels (see Carroll, 1990a, and chapter 6). However, most PE teachers have had no initial training whatsoever in assessment techniques, nor had they normally been used to formally assessing their pupils, though formal testing had been used for some time in governing bodies of sport awards schemes, such as those of the Gymnastics Association (BAGA Awards). Teachers had, of course, been used to assessing as part of the normal teaching situation, but assessment itself had rarely been a focal point. In the teaching situation, assessment was just taken for granted. A massive in-service programme and ‘learn on the job’ was, and still is, required for teachers to understand the issues and cope with the practical problems of carrying out the assessments. Hopefully this book will play a small part in that development. It is necessary, I feel, firstly, to treat assessment as problematic and discuss what it is all about, that is, its nature, principles, modes etc., in order to give readers a better understanding of assessment, clarify its terminology and purpose before discussing physical education in more detail in later chapters. This approach will give readers a better basis for undertaking and understanding assessment.

In this book, the terms ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’ are used in relation to pupils’ assessment and work. They are terms which are in common usage in physical education and the meanings are normally taken for granted. However, there are different meanings in their usage and sometimes confusion in the use of the terms. In this book ‘practical’ refers to a physically active context as in the practical performance of an activity such as gymnastics or games, whilst ‘theoretical’ refers to knowledge, ideas, etc., about aspects of PE, such as knowledge of rules, knowledge of the effects of exercise shown in a non-practical way.

What is Assessment?

Some books which set out to define assessment, do not in fact do that, but instead end up discussing the purposes or uses of assessment. For a better understanding of assessment, a distinction must be made between what assessment is, its purposes and its uses, and in teaching and education it is necessary to clarify these in the practical situation. Even some of the best books on the subject are not always precise enough, for example, Rowntree (1977) which is still one of the best discussions on issues, and Satterly (1989), which is one of the most technically useful and more up-to-date.

Satterly (1989) describes educational assessment as ‘an omnibus term which includes all the processes and products which describe the nature and extent of children's learning, its degree of correspondence with the aims and objectives of teaching and its relationship with the environments which are designed to facilitate learning’ (p. 3).

This is both a global and limiting description at the same time, yet it does not say what assessment actually is. Its limiting factor is that it just relates to learning, and this is clearly seen by Satterly as the educational aspect. Yet there are many other assessments made in schools and educational establishments which may not be encompassed by the term learning, for example behavioural, attitudinal, and personal.

Rowntree (1977) tells readers what assessment is,

more basically, assessment in education can be thought of as occurring whenever one person, in some kind of interaction, direct or indirect with another, is conscious of obtaining and interpreting information about the knowledge and understanding of abilities and attitudes of that other person. (p. 4)

However, Rowntree goes on to suggest that,

Assessment can be descriptive (for example, ‘Bob knows his number bonds up to 20’) without becoming judgmental (for example, ‘Bob is good at number bonds’). (p. 6)

Whilst Rowntree is quite right in his examples, I am going to suggest that assessment always involves making a judgment. The key word in Rowntree's definition is ‘interpretation’ and for assessment to take place, that interpretation will include a judgment or a judgment will follow. So, looking at Rowntree's two examples, both of them involve making a judgment or forming an opinion. The difference is that in the second example, the teacher has placed a value, the construct ‘good’, on Bob's performance at number bonds. In the first instance, the teacher is saying that he has weighed up the evidence, that is, he has seen or heard Bob using or counting his number bonds, probably on several occasions, and he is of the opinion and has judged that ‘Bob knows his number bonds’. The teacher's knowing includes the judgment and is an assessment of the pupil. A purely descriptive statement without judgment would be ‘Bob counted up to twenty’.

Some readers may feel that this is merely a semantic difference, but I do not think so. I want to stress the differences only so far as they are fundamental to the understanding of what assessment is all about. Statements such as the examples given by Rowntree actually say a lot more than the mere words themselves, and they include more judgments and assessments than appear at first sight. Take, for example, the following statements by a teacher in the physical education context:

• ‘Liz passed the ball.’
• ‘Liz can pass the ball.’
• ‘Liz gave a very good pass’.

Statement A is purely descriptive, involves observing and interpreting but no assessment. Statement B is descriptive but involves assessment. The teacher is saying that she (the teacher herself) knows that Liz knows how to pass the ball and will be able to do it again. The evidence for this assessment will be the perception of Liz's actions against the criteria of her intention and the result (did it match the intention?), and resemblance to basic technique. However, statement C gives a value, in this case ‘very good’ to a particular action on one occasion. Again, the criteria are taken for granted but would be the same as in statement B. On this occasion, either the technique or the effectiveness of the pass or both could be used as criteria for the assessment. But it does not say that Liz can pass the ball very well on other occasions, although she may very well be able to do so. ‘Liz can pass the ball very well’ which makes this implication is a different assessment, but applying the same criteria.

As Broadfoot (1979) explains everybody continually makes judgments as part of everyday life and cannot avoid doing so, therefore it is not surprising that it goes on in schools. However, it is clear from the above examples that assessment is an essential and integral part of the teaching-learning situation, the essence of what schools are in business for. Teachers will make judgments continually as part and parcel of the teaching situation, and also may set up particular and formal assessment sessions, for example, tests and examinations to assess what the child can do and how well he or she can do it. In the educational context this ‘how well’ often takes the form of marks or grades, particularly in the formal testing situations. So Liz may receive a six out of ten or a ‘C’ for her passing in netball, and possibly the same mark or grade in the activity as a whole or in her GCSE. This is the public face of assessment. Many people recognize only the mark or grade as assessment or as worthwhile assessment, and many more see it as the most important part of it. Marks and grades are given so much prominence and status, not only because they are public knowledge, but because of the way they are used, for example, for selection purposes. A clear distinction needs to be made between what the marks or grades actually mean and their use. A mark or grade itself does not mean very much without reference to other pupils or a criterion, so we cannot actually say what Liz's six out of ten or C stands for. It only makes sense with knowledge of the assessment grade as a differentiating tool and as a standard of measure, and therefore we shall come back to this point under ‘making sense of the judgment’. The purposes and uses as differentiating tools are more educational than technical, though they may dictate the technical, and will be discussed under other headings in chapter 2.

It is at this point that I think it is necessary to distinguish between assessment and evaluation, two terms which have often been used synonymously because evaluation also means putting a value upon something. However, in educational circles evaluation is normally used in relation to programmes, curriculum, courses or teaching (though appraisal is now used in relation to the latter and to teachers), whereas, assessment is used in relation to pupils and students (Rowntree, 1977). Of course, there is a very close relationship between the assessment of students and the evaluation of programmes and the effectiveness of teaching and programmes, for example, the work of Carroll (1976a) on the evaluation of PE lessons shows that the overall evaluation of lessons is clearly determined by the assessment of the students in terms of attainment, behaviour and effort. However, in the American physical education literature the distinction between assessment and evaluation is not always observed, and here too there is a much closer link between assessment and testing and measurement.

The Basic Questions

Figure 1 shows the place of assessment in the teaching-learning context. The processes of perception, interpretation and judgment (PIJ) are not distinct phases but normally occur almost simultaneously in the teaching-learning episode. Both teachers and pupils undertake these processes, but it is only in recent years that teachers have consciously brought pupils more formally into the process through Records of Achievement and different teaching styles. This is the who of assessment (who does the assessing?).

There are two clear stages in the assessment process—in the when of assessment (when does assessment take place?). Firstly, the immediate within the interactive phase of the lesson, and secondly the post-lesson phase (Jackson, 1968; Carroll, 1976a). The most distinguishing features of the two phases in this time dimension are; in the first phase, the necessity for quick decisions and immediacy of action, and the ephemeral nature of the cues and evidence; in the second phase, the more considered reflection, and the overall impression from evidence ‘lumped together’ of practical work, and durable evidence in the form of written work. The latter can be particularly useful in assessing students ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1: What is This Thing Called ‘Assessment’ all About?
• Chapter 2: Why Assess in Physical Education?
• Chapter 3: What Can Teachers Assess in Physical Education?
• Chapter 4: How Can Practical Performance be Assessed Satisfactorily?
• Chapter 5: How Can Theoretical Work be Assessed Satisfactorily?
• Chapter 6: Issues in Examinations and Accreditation
• Chapter 7: Recording Achievement
• Chapter 8: Assessment in the National Curriculum
• Chapter 9: Consequences and Effects of Assessment
• References
• Appendix: Useful Addresses