Reflection by Kyle Sutton – ACHPER NSW Board member 

I was recently reading a position statement on Assessment in Physical Education brought together by 71 experts from 20 different countries. It got me thinking about Assessment in PE  because of its long history of being undervalued and from what the research in this paper highlights, a quality that “is worrisome with physical educators struggling to meet the demands for a reliable and valid grading system”.

I remember from my own experiences at school that whether or not we had the correct uniform or whether or not we were participating within a lesson would equate to a grade based on effort rather than knowledge and skills. The research has also indicated a high prevalence of assessing technical skills in isolation making it difficult for students to really understand an alignment between the lesson tasks and assessment but also the relevance to the outside world as they were not authentic.

The AIESEP statement has six sections which were aligned to the main themes of their original seminar; Assessment Literacy, Assessment & Policy, Instructional Alignment, Assessment for learning, Physical Education Teacher Education and continuing Professional Development, Digital Technology in PE.

As a PDHPE teacher I strongly believe that a high level of Assessment literacy will ensure the quality produced by students meets the criteria and achieves the learning outcomes being assessed. Regarding assessment policy, we are all somewhat bound by the recommendations from NESA and our own school body so it is important to look at the timing and weighting of when these tasks are delivered. In our middle school setting we have dropped the number of assessments to three per year group with a class component for each semester. In PDHPE we focussed on having a task that was mainly practical, one that was mainly theory and another that was an integration of the two. 

Instructional alignment is important for PE as it is ‘not about playing games or sport, nor is it simply building fitness or accumulating a minimum amount of physical activity during the lessons. The focus should be about purposeful learning. My school has been working on assessment within a middle school context where we want students to have a choice in their learning and how they are assessed. Students prior to picking their electives for the year are engaged in a voice and choice day where they are exposed to the electives that they wish to partake in. Students are engaged in what the scope and sequence will look like including assessment. Providing students in year 8 with this opportunity prior to them taking the subject in year 9 has seen a marketed drop in numbers of students changing electives in year 9.

Assessment for learning was also something that the students thought should be part of the learning process rather than an assessment at the end of the unit. By “embedding assessment in the learning process, the principles of feed-up, feedback and feed-forward” could be incorporated into our units of work, which would increase the rigour of our assessments. The difficulty with some schools is that you still have the assessment booklet that goes to the community where assessments are scheduled for specific dates to ensure students don’t feel too overwhelmed by having too many assessments for each KLA at any one time. One way we approached this was to have an assessment “ongoing” until a point in time, usually towards the end of term to provide students with enough time to complete it.