Overview

    Without student assessments, it is not conceivably possible to know if students are learning and meeting the goals and course expectations of a class. “The main purpose of the assessment is to help the province, school districts, schools and school planning councils evaluate how well students are achieving basic skills, and make plans to improve student achievement” (BC Ministry of Education). Assessment in physical education will help teachers describe how much learning has taken place in a given amount of time, judge or evaluate the quality of that learning and make decisions for improving instructions.

    There are many ways to assess; for example, skill testing, fitness testing, game performance testing, activity logs, personal journals, oral examinations, interviews, portfolios and teacher, peer, and self-observations with performance checklists. Some problems which can occur when assessing are problems of practicality (when and how), may leave unanswered questions about achievement, may provide little information on how to improve knowledge, performance, or fitness level and may narrow focus on achievement. Some key principles to use when assessing however are knowledge can be demonstrated in a variety of ways, all of which are valid, the process of learning is as important as the outcomes themselves, diverse learning goals require diverse assessments and high-order learning requires inventive assessment not possible with traditional methods.

    It is important to keep on improving your skill at teaching in order or create an experience that students find engaging and fun.  In order to make sure that the students had retained some of the knowledge that we tried to instill upon them during class, we asked them a few  review questions at the end of class. This was a review for them, and a way to make sure we were explaining things well enough for us. We also implemented drills, which were progressions to skills that the students learnt from previous classes. This allowed us to assess their development in such skills as scooping, cradling, passing, shooting, catching and movement.

Reference:

BC Ministry of Education. Retrieved on April 3rd, 2009 at http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/assessment/fsa/