Assessment
Assessment must be useful for the learner and the teacher.
Our team believes that assessment is more than assigning a grade at the end of a unit. Rather, assessment is central to both student and teacher learning and needs to be incorporated with varying emphasis throughout lessons. We also emphasize student involvement in the assessment process.
Assessment in our class will range from summative (formal) to formative (informal).
Examples include:
Informal formative assessment will be incorporated into every class in the form of a daily self/peer assessment journal. Each class students will receive a new page for their journal with the assessment emphasis of the day. This page may include:
-Record tables to keep track of task performance
-Blank spaces to record play strategies
-Reflection questions
-Self rating on participation, and peer support
-Progress check lists for skill progressions
-Recommendations and observations on task performance from peers
Formal summative assessment will focus on more than overall skill ability. Scoring and marking will also emphasize sportsmanship, and skill improvement. This provides the opportunity for all students to succeed regardless of natural talent. It also provides a way to assess effort beyond simple active participation. Specifically, the game performance assessment instrument (GPAI) approach (Brown & Hopper, 2006) will be used to rate student improvement in specific skills within each game category.
GPAI identified skills for territory invasion games are: base, adjust, decision making, skill execution, support, cover and marking. Most of these skill categories are transferable to net/wall games, and batting/fielding.
When students become involved in watching and assessing their peers, they have the opportunity to critically reflect on what techniques do and do not work. They are then able to transfer their observations to their own skills and, as a result, improve their own play. As a result assessment becomes part of the learning process (assessment as learning).
Student journals are also an essential part of assessment for learning. Teachers are able to routinely monitor student understanding of tasks so that they can make adaptations and refinements to future lessons.
An example of a specific formative assessment technique would be to have students record their achievements at a series of specialized skill stations. The skills assessed at these stations would then be the focus of a series of skill building games that grow in complexity. At the end of the unit students would re-do the series of skill stations and they would then be assessed based on improvement and demonstrable understanding of the skills taught in class.
Here is a possible example of assessment for a beginner Field Hockey unit:
Assessment stations pre and post assessment for Field Hockey
Students will be involved in assessing their peers through keeping records of achievement in a passport booklet.
Field Hockey assessment station booklet
Brown, S., & Hopper, T. (2006). Should all students in PE get an 'A'? Game performance assessment by peers as a critical component of student learning. The PHE, 72(1), 14-21.
Rink, J. (1998). Assessment in the instructional process. In Teaching physical education for learning (pp. 255-280). St. Louis, Missouri: McGraw-Hill.