After reading the chapter on assessment and seeing the way the group on Tuesday used a rubric for assessment of their activity, I have a new appreciation for the difficulty and complexity of effective assessment in P.E. It’s much more difficult than I had expected. It seems that particularly in P.E., assessment is quite a challenge. I originally felt like I would want to assess based more on effort and participation- that is what seemed fairer to me based on my experience. I want to avoid giving good assessment only to those who are more physically fit or physically literate than others. However the chapter outlined some issues with weighing your assessment too heavily on participation and effort. They suggest a balance is required between assessing skills and participation/effort. I can see why this makes sense, but I am still struggling to find the best approach. I also leaned towards the idea of assessing based on improvement. Again, the chapter pointed out that students who were already competent in an area would not be graded well because they didn’t have far to improve. So this isn’t fair either. As the readings and the lecture in class suggested, using a diversity of assessment will be important for accuracy and fairness.
I liked the criteria used in the group’s rubric on Tuesday. It was really helpful to see them create a rubric for a lesson they had planned. It sounds easy to do and a lot more challenging when you sit down to do it. I especially liked how they incorporated “a good attitude” into their rubric. I think it’s so important for kids to know ahead of time what the expectations are and if they see the inclusion of criteria focusing on attitude, teamwork or helping others they will learn that those aspects are equally as important as physical skills.
I have many of the same concerns as Sacha does when is comes to assessment. It will be a challenge to assess children in all three learning domains – if you have a class of 30 kids, that is 90 assessment sections that need to be considered! I see now why Steve says it is really important to have a paper trail, because I don’t think that so much information would be retained in the head until report card season.
I also would tend to assess students based more on participation and effort, but this is in some ways tied into assessing improvement and fitness. As a teacher comes to know their students’ abilities, they will be able to judge what effort may look like for each student, and thus whether they are pushing to improve their fitness or not. I wonder if the improvement model of assessment would be more effective if students were not made aware of the marking rubric until after they do their first fitness test? I can see that using the improvement model would be time-consuming and hard to relate to curriculum requirements.
As Sacha said, it seems that the key to a balanced and fair PE assessment comes down to a diverse approach, so that the drawbacks of any particular type can be compensated for with another rubric. Also, students who struggle with their fitness level can be proud of their improvement, or highly fit students don’t automatically pass PE without demonstrating effort.
The one thing that I have noticed in my practicum class is the use of various evaluations. For instance the teacher and students create rubrics for their project or assignment assessments. Together they come up with an agreed upon list that they will all agree too. When it comes to assess they also have peer assessments where fellow students assess each other. I thought it might be a bit unfair at first but when I compared the self, peer and teacher assessments they were all pretty accurate or rather the same. I realize that there are many things to consider when doing assessment and evaluations but we must always remember as new teachers to be innovative and be open to try new things. I love the idea of not reinventing the wheel. This is something that my sponsor teacher has taught me. We do not need to create more work for us, if there are already awesome tools developed and that is something that I always have at the back of my mind. Where are those awesome teachers, what are they doing and how can I incorporate what they have developed by trial and error or what can I borrow to enhance my lesson. I believe in PE we can do this as well!