School Name: Nakusp Secondary
School District: SD#10 Arrow Lakes
Inquiry Team Members: Jarrett Bass: Jarrett.bass@sd10.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: jarrett.bass@sd10.bc.ca
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE
Grade Levels: Secondary (8-12)
Curricular Area(s): Physical & Health Education
Focus Addressed: Formative assessment
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? Who do I make meaningful fitness testing in P.E. classes
Scanning: The questions I latched most onto were: where are we going? and how are we doing? I feel that is very easy to do fitness testing, but it is very hard to do it in a way that it actually gives students an idea of where to go next. I think for most involved fitness testing feels like summative assessment. But for it to be truly powerful it should look most like formative assessment.
Focus: I wanted a way to measure how my students were doing, so that I knew if my teaching techniques and activities were improving students fitness levels. I was hoping to see if my students were improving their strength and fitness.
Hunch: I think that all schools are probably struggling to some extend to measure fitness levels. I don’t think any of the structures we have are really any different than any other schools. I don’t know how much the structures of the school can help in this instance.
New Professional Learning: CBT has some good literature about physical literacy and how to measure it. Though a lot of their tests are about coordination and physical literacy which is a bit easier to measure than something like fitness which is probably the most ambiguous and hard to classify, it is a lot harder to measure than something like strength. The BC Soccer Premier league (Under 13 to Under 18) has fitness testing that they do with their athletes at scheduled intervals throughout the season.
Taking Action: I chose the following things to be tested: how long can you hold plank position, how long can you hold a wall sit, how long you can hold v-sit position. how long you can do pushups without stopping, how long can you do sit ups without stopping, as well as the beep test (a running cardio, interval, running test). We did each of these tests twice in a semester once at the beginning, and once at the end.
Checking: One thing I found hard to deal with is, because I was up front with the students at the start that we would be doing this multiple times, I think that a lot of the students did not try their hardest on the first round of fitness testing, because they knew if they did that they would be able to improve on their numbers in the second test if they just tried harder. This of course makes it very hard to track improvement.
Reflections/Advice: I have learnt that the crux of a project like this is choosing the activities to use to test each students fitness is probably the most important aspect, and needs to be planned carefully. Next year I would like to attempt to continue this work.