Tips to Effectively Assess Students in PE [Interactive]

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[0:02] Assessments can be really confusing for teachers. How about some user-friendly useful and efficient assessments? Stay tuned and I’ll share some resources.

[0:37] No matter how long you’ve been teaching, assessments can be a challenge. You have questions such as how do we do it without taking a substantial amount of time? How do we make the assessment useful? What do we assess? Is it skill? Is it fitness? This guy over here says we should assess affective domain. Some say formative, some say a summative. How do I better get at student learning or am I really impacting their learning? All of these contribute to the confusion and the complexity of assessment.

Simplifying Student Assessment

[1:07] But I’m gonna try and simplify it just a little bit. Here are some simple principles that I think will help as assessments are developed.

Assesements Should Be Educational

The first thing is that it seems like a no brainer, but assessments should be educational and as they’re developed, they should be created in a manner that allows them to be educational and useful and allows the data to be used for students to give student feedback or to evaluate where students are moving towards an outcome, but also for teachers and for curriculum modifications. So there are lots of different uses for assessments and I think it’s important that we make sure that they are educational.

Assesements Should Be Efficient

[1:46] Next, I think assessments should be efficient. Some teachers take a substantial amount of time assessing individual students which obviously takes away time from learning for that student as well as other students. So if we design our assessments carefully, we can assess students efficiently and while they are engaged in the entire class is engaged and that takes some thoughtful consideration as the process of developing assessments takes place.

Assesements Should Be Based on an Outcome

[2:13] Lastly probably the most important, I think that assessment should be based on an outcome. The outcome is a measurable target for the lesson and from that outcome, the assessment is created and then from both of those the outcome and the assessment, the lesson can be built to help students meet that target or outcome. For example, an outcome might be the student will be able to throw a yarn ball to a wall using three or four queues or the student will demonstrate good spacing while playing tag.

Assessment Example

[2:47] So for the example with throwing a yarn ball, the whole lesson might not be throwing constantly, but a substantial amount of the lesson will be on throwing and focusing on those four queues of throwing and having students through a yarn ball to a wall and then the teacher might use a checklist or some other type of assessment to assess student progress towards performing those cues.

Download Free PE Assessment Examples

[3:12] I think if we can make assessments educational, efficient, and based on an outcome we’ll have much stronger assessments. All of our assessments in the Dynamic PE ASAP curriculum, which is on Gopher’s website were designed using these principles. We have teacher checklists, we have teacher questioning, we have peer assessment, self-assessments, written exit slips, bike racks, all written with these principles in mind. So I encourage you to take a look at some of the assessments we have on the curriculum. Get some data that will help you help your students help your curriculum and help your teaching and let us know what you think.

Learn more about Dynamic PE ASAP assessments.

THRIVE!

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