Professor David Kirk

David Kirk joined Loughborough University in November 1998. He is currently Professor of Physical Education and Sport. He also holds an Honorary Chair in Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia and an Adjunct Chair in Physical Education at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Professor Kirk has degrees from the Scottish School of Physical Education, the University of Glasgow and Loughborough University. Professor Kirk’s research interests include young people in sport, curriculum change in physical education, the body, schooling and culture, and situated learning in physical education and sport.

Learning and Assessment in Physical Education

David Kirk, Loughborough University
Presentation to the Annual Conference of the Physical Education Association of Ireland
Ennis, October 2001

Introduction

Assessment is one of the most fraught and troublesome issues physical educators have had to deal with over the past twenty years or so, in particular since examinable forms of the subject first appeared in secondary schools during the 1970s in England and Australia. Prior to the 1970s, for much of the modern history of school physical education, assessment has not been an issue at all. Back in the days when the majority of school children experienced a drilling and exercising form of physical education, in Britain and Australia between the 1880s until the 1940s, assessment, in so far as it existed, was straightforward. The instructor could see clearly whether or not individual children were executing the exercises correctly. In any case, one of the main goals of this form of physical education was children's instant obedience to the word of command, a matter that was rarely ambiguous.

When sport-based physical education began to emerge during the 1950s in government schools as the dominant form of the subject, assessment was once again a non-issue. Indeed, it was considered obvious by physical education teachers who the talented performers were simply by observing them play. This goal of excellence in sports performance was rarely made explicit during the post-second world war decades, cloaked as it was in the rhetoric of the 'whole child' purloined from the briefly influential educational gymnasts. Nevertheless it was this judgement about children's performance, alongside them being busy, happy and good, that mattered most to teachers.

For a brief time, during the late 1960s to the late 1980s in the USA, Britain and Australia, 'objective testing' of children's motor skills and fitness was in vogue. But it didn't take too long for reflective teachers to recognise that the need for the scientific rigour of the tests resulted in an ecological validity problem, whereby the tests failed to produce information on the bigger picture of what children might be learning in and through physical education. It was partly in response to the dominance of this testing and skill development form of physical education that physical educators such as Bunker and Thorpe (1982) felt it was timely, in the early 1980s, to alert teachers to the need for children to be able to play the game rather than merely perform isolated but easily testable motor skills.

Physical educators really only began to take the issue of assessment seriously in the 1970s, when the first examinable forms of the subject began to appear. Assessment of so called 'theoretical' knowledge was carried out in conventional fashion consistent with other more established subjects, by examination, essay or multiple choice questions. Assessment of so called 'practical work' was less easily carried out. Various practices emerged, including the use of motor skill and fitness tests, tables of points awarded for performance in areas such as swimming and athletics, and the so-called 'subjective judgement' of the teacher on matters such as game performance.

This approach to assessment never felt comfortable for many physical educators. Many had confronted and failed to resolve the paradox of the physically gifted performer who had trouble spelling 'physiology' never mind understanding and applying the concepts and content. Many stood apologetic but defiant in the use of their own professional expertise to carry out 'subjective assessment' of game performance. Some struggled to come to terms with the very unsatisfactory divide between theoretical and practical content. And there were a considerable number of physical educators who opposed the idea of examinable physical education altogether because these difficulties with assessment meant, for them, that the real value of the subject was not being realised.

These matters came to a head in the 1990s in a number of school systems around the world when governments began to demand higher levels of accountability from schools and teachers in an effort to raise educational standards. The recording and reporting of children's progress in all forms of physical education, not just the examinable form, was now on the agenda. Whatever we might think of the standards movement, and however we might wish to condemn its excesses, I believe physical education can and should benefit from its inclusion in this new agenda of accountability. In my view, exclusion from this requirement to record and report would have been fatal to physical education's continuing existence in the compulsory curriculum. But there remains much confusion and uncertainty and a great deal of trepidation about how to tackle this task.

Today I want to address this challenge of assessment in physical education in this era of accountability in schooling. A criticism often made by opponents of examinable forms of physical education is that this form of the subject is solely concerned with status seeking. Rather than get snared in the politics of this agenda, I want to focus instead on the positive educational benefits for pupils and the professional benefits for teachers that can follow in meeting this challenge. In order to do this, I believe we need to begin with a clear understanding of the nature of learning in, about and through physical education. Without this understanding, it is very difficult to talk sensibly about assessment. I also believe we need to rethink some of our conventional assumptions about assessment, particularly assumptions about its purpose and its methods. Already, substantial progress has been made on assessment in some parts of Australia, while various bodies in England such as the QCA, the PEA and BAALPE have also started to address assessment in earnest. I will draw on my experience of the Australian developments in the main part of this presentation to consider the challenges of assessment in the new curriculum initiatives in Ireland. So, first of all, to the question of learning.

Learning and Physical Education: the Spectre of Dualism

Our collective ability as a professional group to conceptualise learning in our subject has been bedevilled by the complex and enduring problem of mind-body dualism. Even though philosophers have debated this issue in relation to physical education for many years, and some believe they have resolved it, at least to their own satisfaction, there has nevertheless been little gain in terms of the practice of physical education in schools. The rhetoric of educating the whole child, attractive though it is, has not assisted us to think clearly about how we should shape educational experiences in physical education to achieve this goal. Nor has a mere listing of the various dimensions of human life, the physical, social, moral, emotional, and so on, been of much practical help. This is not to say that these claims have not been valid. Rather, it is to assert that they have not been useful in clarifying how we might think about learning and the practical consequences of our understanding of learning for designing learning experiences for young people.

The recent emergence of new lines of research on learning in physical education, some of which have focused particularly on learning in games, is beginning to provide us with opportunities to bury dualistic thinking for good (Dodds et al., 2001; Rovegno et al., 2001). These new approaches are beginning to provide us first of all with a new vocabulary for thinking and talking about learning in the physical domain. And secondly, they are providing us with a clearer sense of how we might make valid measurements of learning, particularly though not exclusively in game contexts. Constructivism is a broad label for these new approaches to learning.

Constructivist Approaches to Learning

Three broad and common features of a constructivist approach to learning are that learning is active, learning is developmental, and learning is multi-layered (see Kirk & Macdonald, 1998; Rovegno & Kirk, 1995).

Learning is an active process

The idea that learning is an active process challenges the traditional approach to teaching physical activity where it assumes that learners passively mirror the commands of the teacher. Constructivist researchers claim that people actively attempt to make sense of specific tasks within a set of environmental conditions and in relation to what they know they can already do. An example of this would be learning to use the lay up shot in basketball.

Performing a lay up involves at least two things. First, learners need to perform the combined and appropriately sequenced techniques of dribbling the ball, the pick up, the step and jump, and the shot itself. Second, they need to decide when it's right to use the lay up based on their perceptions of the state of the game. Learning to perform this shot involves three processes identified in the information processing approach as perceiving, deciding and acting (Abernethy et al., 1996). It is not unusual for a novice basketballer to be able to perform the actions of the lay up shot in an unopposed practice, but then to never use the shot during a game, because they do not know how to recognise when the shot is the best option; that is, their perceptual and decision-making abilities remain underdeveloped.

The interaction and interdependency of individual abilities, task demands and environmental conditions are evident in learning to lay up a basketball shot. These three factors feature in many other physical skills that are part and parcel of everyday life, as well as games and sports. Driving a car is a good example of an everyday activity where the interdependent processes of perception, decision-making and skill execution are at work. People are continually required to make judgements about what they can already do in relation to what the task is asking them to do and in relation to particular sets of circumstances. In order to perform physical skills like the lay up shot successfully, learners need to make judgements about the relationships between these three factors.

The idea that learning is an active process also takes into account the learner's motivation and readiness to learn. A constructivist approach acknowledges that people have feelings and emotions that influence their willingness to work hard, to accept failure and not become discouraged, to experience discomfort, and to feel elated when they succeed. People also display preferences for how they like to learn. Some prefer to watch, listen and experiment, others prefer to try an activity first and refine their learning through feedback. Learners' preferences may change depending on the nature of the task and their prior experiences.

Learning is developmental

So, how individuals learn changes as they move from the status of novice to expert. We would expect that an experienced basketball player is likely to be able to learn to adapt to novel circumstances more easily than a beginner. Indeed, one of the ways we can distinguish between an expert and a novice is on the basis of the speed and ease with which the expert adapts to changing or novel circumstances compared to the novice.

Prior to reaching physical maturity, changes to an individual's size and strength will have a pronounced effect on learning. Coping with these changes may be a source of clumsiness as some young people struggle to match their existing skills and their expectations of their competence with changes to their bodies. Similarly, as people grow older and begin to experience physical deterioration, learning is also affected. This ongoing process of growth, development and maturation across the lifespan means that how people learn is never constant.

Within this broad lifespan perspective, we can also note that learning is developmental in relation to the phases people typically pass through as they are learning physical skills. Some researchers have suggested that there are three distinct phases in skill learning, a cognitive phase, a practice or associative phase and an autonomous phase. These phases describe a learner's journey from beginner to experienced performer.

The cognitive phase involves the person grasping the demands of the task to be learned and becoming aware of the circumstances or conditions under which it would typically be performed. The associative or practice phase involves the person in gradually improving their ability to cope with more and more information about the task and environment through practice and experience. Typically, the autonomous phase is thought of as an end point in learning a physical skill. This is when the performance of the skill becomes so automatic that learners don't need to attend consciously to the individual actions that make up the skill.

I have some doubts as to whether this is an entirely useful way to describe the learning process. It is true that one characteristic of an expert compared with a novice is that the execution of a skill seems to be automatic. But this need not imply that the expert player is no longer capable of thinking, learning and improving. The key point to bear in mind here is that the learning process varies depending on the level of expertise and prior experience of the learner.

Learning is multi-layered

A third characteristic of constructivist approaches to learning is that learning is multi-layered. People typically learn more than one thing at a time. For instance, a learner's task may be to learn the lay up shot in basketball. They may be trying very hard to master the movements that make up this shot and to recognise when to use it. While working on the lay up, however, they may also be learning that they enjoy or dislike basketball, that some of their team-mates are good to work with, while some are too selfish with the ball and don't give others a fair go. They may also be learning what their teacher or coach means when she gives advice in a certain way, when she is serious and when she is only joking. Moreover, everyone in the basketball class will learning about appropriate behaviour in this setting and appropriate ways of being feminine or masculine.

Recognizing that learning is multi-layered is important, because it highlights the complexity of acquiring even the most basic physical skills. It also allows learners to begin to see how broader aspects of life such as the social construction of gender are taking place while they are learning physical skills. It is often only when some of the unspoken rules are broken that the things individuals learn in the process of learning physical skills are made explicit. Researchers sometimes refer to the less obvious or visible aspects of learning as the hidden curriculum.

This constructivist perspective, I believe, provides us with a new language for talking about learning in our subject. The picture this perspective provides shows that learning to play games and sports, to swim, to run, jump and throw, to dance, to participate in outdoor and adventurous activities and to manage the body in a controlled and skilful manner in gymnastic and other activities, involves a complex mix of movement competencies, cognitive processes and emotional dispositions. From this perspective, it should be clear that many of our previous attempts at assessment in physical education have been woefully inadequate in terms of doing justice to the real educational benefits that are there for young people to obtain. So how do we go about the task of assessment in a way that can do justice to the educational potential of physical education?

A New Vocabulary for Assessment

First of all, I think this notion of learning as active, developmental and multi-layered has direct implications for how we think about assessment itself. For some in physical education, the word assessment brings to mind images of final exams and formal tests. As I've already said, assessment doesn't sit comfortably with many physical educators who find the word too formal to suit their aspirations for their subject.

The notion that assessment can be used for both formative and summative purposes at least signals that the term may be a little more flexible than the traditional image of do-or-die examinations it conjures up. Summative assessment, as we know, usually occurs at the end of a course or unit of study and involves summing up what a person has learned. This summative use of assessment tells us where an individual has reached on their learning journey, but it comes too late to provide useful corrective feedback to the learner. Formative assessment does just this, and involves providing information to learners in the course of their learning journey so that they remain on or regain the right track. If learning is developmental, if it is an unfolding process of emerging expertise, then our assessment techniques need to support this process so that we have a record of the learner's progress over time. In other words, one-off, end of course snap shots of an individual's learning are educationally inappropriate.

The idea that assessment can play a formative role in the learning process is hardly new or grounding breaking, but in very traditional examination-driven educational systems, it has been used for this purpose less often than it should or could. But this situation is changing. The increasing use of formative assessment as part of the learning process in countries such as Australia and Britain over the past decade has lead to the emergence of a new vocabulary for assessment. Key terms include 'recording and reporting on progress' and 'making judgements about progress'.

I believe this is an altogether more useful vocabulary for assessment since it captures the key feature of learning as developmental. It captures the notion that learning is an ongoing process and that all learners are able to move forward and make progress. It also captures the idea that judgement is an inescapable part of assessment, and that judgements about progress need to be grounded in evidence that is recorded over a period of time. This vocabulary, I suggest, is a far cry from a traditional do-or-die approach to assessment, an approach that was often more interested to discover what learners do not know rather than what they have accomplished. A developmental notion of assessment with progress and judgement at the centre of it is, I think, more likely to be concerned with noting and celebrating what learners can do.

Integration of Knowledge

The notion that learning is multi-layered suggests that it is unhelpful to use only one method of collecting information on a learner's progress. It also suggests it may be unhelpful to continue to teach and assess 'theoretical' and 'practical' knowledge separately. If learning is multi-layered, and so takes place on a number of levels simultaneously, then it may be useful to think about how we might integrate forms of knowledge through the very careful construction of learning experiences for young people.

Integration refers to linking the learning of subject matter such as physiology or history with learning in physical activities such as badminton or swimming. Recently, physical educators in Australia have found ways of applying this principle of integration to school programmes. They have done this by developing learning experiences that provide learners with opportunities to make connections and links between theoretical and practical knowledge. They also provide a basis for assessment tasks that permit the collection of information over time.

Here are some examples of learning experiences from the current Queensland Senior Physical Education syllabus (BSSSS, 1998; Macdonald et al., 2000; Macdonald & Brooker, 1997a). The physical activity is Touch (formerly known as touch football or touch rugby) and is a very popular game among young people in Australia. The first learning experience draws on the subject matter of sport psychology:

Students identify the psychological characteristics of players in their team and the psychological elements impacting on Touch performances. They then use this information to design and implement psychological strategies such as goal setting, feedback and communication, imagery, and controlling anxiety for their team and evaluate the impact of these techniques on their team's performance in competition.

The second learning experience draws on exercise physiology:

Students use heart rate monitors to determine the effect of game modifications such as five a side Touch on the energy demands on players. They then apply this information to the development of a training program for their team, using concepts such as progressive overload, training thresholds, specificity and reversibility. They repeat data collection at a later date to determine the effectiveness of the training program in relation to game performance.

A third learning experience uses information from the socio-cultural area:

Students collect data on rule infringement, player interactions, and defensive and attacking contributions during games. They then analyse this data using theories of sport behaviour and socialisation. This information is applied to develop a number of specific pro-social behaviours that teams practice during the course of a sport education season of Touch.

A fourth learning experience draws on knowledge of how learning occurs in physical activities:

Make modifications to Touch that assist players in your team to practice and develop the following team and individual strategies and skills: making space in attack, through the pop pass, spin pass, dump and scoop and wraps; denying space in defense by numbering off, line and zone defence. Evaluate the effectiveness of your practices by analysing your team's use of these tactics in competitive matches.

Each of these learning experiences provides students with opportunities to acquire, apply and evaluate knowledge directly in relation to their participation in Touch. It makes sense then that the Queensland syllabus requires teachers to compile a portfolio of individual student's learning achievements using physical tasks, written tasks and oral tasks. Information is collected through a range of techniques. For written tasks, information on student learning can be collected through tests and exams, essays, journals, and research reports. For oral tasks, seminar presentations, panels of experts, interviews, short answer questions (usually video taped) and debates can be used.

Written and oral assessment tasks are designed to draw on student's practical experience of physical activity, since the Syllabus requires practical work to form 50 per cent of the physical education timetable. This means that a student would be unable to complete a written or oral task successfully without having experienced practical physical activity first hand. Significantly, reflecting the notion that learning is developmental, the Syllabus also mandates that student progress must be selectively updated throughout the two years course of study. It also mandates that the exit level of achievement is to be determined by means of continuous assessment rather than by a single measurement at the end of the course.

The following is a sample oral assessment task in rock-climbing using knowledge from sport psychology:

Pre-performance interview: Before the climb, students predict their performance with regard to their expected levels of anxiety, predict the anticipated effects of anxiety on their performance, and describe the techniques they might use to control this anxiety. Students perform a modified rock-climbing task, eg. blindfold or with loose holds which is video-taped.

Post-performance interview: Students evaluate the climb in terms of the experience of anxiety, the effects it had on performance as shown on video-tape, and their evaluation of the effectiveness of their use of techniques to control that anxiety.

The following is a sample written assessment task, which is an essay written under exam conditions, and is in the area of gymnastics using material from the socio-cultural aspects of the course:

Compare and contrast the stereotypical body image of gymnasts in your class with the popular image promoted by the media. Propose an alternative view that the media could adopt towards male and female body image. Explain how such a view could enhance popular perceptions of physical fitness and body image and appreciation of sports such as gymnastics.

Although they are carefully constructed to relate directly to the learner's practical experiences of physical activity, written and oral assessment tasks deal for the most part with what the philosopher Peter Arnold (1985) calls the 'about' dimension of learning, that is, learning about the physical. Rather more tricky is the construction of physical assessment tasks that test what Arnold calls learning in the physical domain, including techniques, skills and strategies (Macdonald & Brooker, 1997b). However, here we are assisted greatly by the notion that learning is an active process that involves the interdependent activities of engaging with the physical task at hand, in a particular set of circumstances, in light of the learner's self-knowledge of his or her existing capabilities

• The Syllabus requires teachers to design physical assessment tasks that collect information on the three assessment criteria for Senior physical education, which are acquiring, applying and evaluating. These criteria are applied equally to physical, written and oral assessment tasks. It's worth noting that:
• Acquiring refers to abilities such as gathering, recalling, recognising and comprehending information;
  
• Applying refers to abilities such as interpreting, analysing and manipulating information;
  
• Evaluating refers to abilities such as predicting, synthesising, justifying and appraising information.

This requirement means that many of the physical assessment tasks test the acquisition, application and evaluation of techniques, skills and strategies together rather than in isolation. An example of a physical assessment task in basketball is as follows:

Students demonstrate offensive techniques, skills and tactics in a 3 on 3 half-court game. They demonstrate their ability to evaluate game-play through the selection of appropriate individual and team skills and strategies in relation to an analysis of their opposition's strengths and weaknesses.

An example of a physical assessment task in golf looks like this:

Students engage in a one-hole walk-and-talk task. They play the hole and explain the situation, their judgements and the decisions they make as they play. They may talk about club selection based on their assessment of the accuracy and distance they know they can achieve with particular clubs, the influence of the terrain, weather, and the state of play in the match. They might also provide an assessment of their performance of strokes and explanations for the outcomes of shots.

Hopefully you can see from these examples that it is the interdependency of techniques, skills and strategies that is being tested through these tasks rather than any of these aspects of performance in isolation. Informed by the notion that learning is an active process, students are required to recognise key information in the immediate environment, make decisions about skills and strategies, execute techniques, and demonstrate a capacity to analyse and learn from their performances.

The Use of Standards

Clearly, the Queensland Syllabus uses criterion-referenced assessment to assist teachers to design learning experiences and assessment tasks and to make judgements about student performance. So how do teachers discriminate between different levels of performance on each of the three criteria? The Syllabus sets out five standards, from A to E, that is meant to reflect the range of achievement at senior high school level. There are standards statements for each of the criteria. Here are some examples of A, C and E standards for each criterion:

Acquiring:

Standard A - The student consistently performs a wide range of physical responses fluently and with speed and accuracy.
Standard C - The student performs a range of physical responses accurately.
Standard E - The student attempts physical responses.

Applying:

Standard A - The student consistently and successfully applies and adapts physical responses in complex performance environments.
Standard C - The student successfully applies physical responses in simple performance environments.
Standard E - The student attempts to apply physical responses in simple performance environments.

Evaluating:

Standard A - The student produces credible and convincingly justified responses evaluating physical activities.
Standard C - The student produces appropriate responses involving reflection and decision making in simple or familiar performance environments.
Standard E - The student produces descriptive rather than evaluative responses relating to physical activities only with considerable assistance.

It is common practice for Queensland teachers to translate these standards into a form that relates substantively to particular physical activities and subject matter. The assessment process places teacher judgement at its centre. But this does not mean that teachers make these judgements merely on a whim or in an opinionated way. The entire system is carefully regulated and teachers have considerable support to assist them to arrive at fair, consistent and transparent judgements about student achievement.

Assessment and the Quality Assurance Process in Queensland

Consistency in the application of these criteria and standards to student work is assured in two ways, both using peer review panels at district and then state levels. Assuring consistency is crucial since the Queensland senior high school assessment system is entirely school-based across all subjects and has been since the early 1970s.

First, teachers are required to write a work program for their school based on the Syllabus that is then accredited by a district peer review panel. Accreditation lasts for five years and includes scrutiny of the curriculum and assessment tasks schools propose to use. This process allows teachers to make choices about which particular activities and content are best suited to their schools and their students while conforming to the general mandates of the Syllabus.

Second, samples of student work are collected in a folio and submitted to the panel at the end of year 11, which is the first year of the two year Senior Physical Education course, and again at the end of year 12. The year 12 submission is the crucial one since panels are required to verify the school's assessment of the standard of student work. The folio contains samples of work including 7 to 9 assessment tasks that must cover subject matter from all three content or 'theory' areas and video tapes of student performance in selected physical activities. Panels have the power to shift grades down if they think marking is too generous, and shift them up if they think it is too hard.

Schools have the right of appeal if they believe the panel has made a mistake, but such appeals are rare. This system has worked extremely well for over twenty years and has resulted in high levels of professional development among teachers at senior high school level in terms of their expertise in school-based curriculum development and assessment. It is important to note that this system could not work without the support provided by panels and by development and review officers of the Board of Senior Secondary School Studies who are able to assist schools to write their programs and construct their assessment tasks.

Could Aspects of This System Work in Ireland?

There some obvious differences between Queensland and Ireland in terms of the context of school assessment. The continuing existence of external examinations in Ireland is clearly an important difference. The assessment of 'practical activity' needs to be addressed nonetheless, as does the integration of 'theoretical' and 'practical' knowledge through assessment.

On the first issue, for the assessment of 'practical activity', I suggest that the construction and use of criteria and standards could assist teachers and external examiners since they would be teaching for and judging learning on the same, explicitly stated, basis. This is particularly important for the use of physical tasks as a source of evidence of student learning. If there are no criteria that are shared and understood by teachers, external examiners and, we might add, students, there is a danger that any judgement an external makes could be viewed as unreliable, lacking objectivity, and opaque, rather than transparent.

One possibility could be that teachers assist students to compile a portfolio of achievement during the course of study, and that this is made available to the examiner before or during the visit. The purpose of the visit then becomes moderation and verification of the teacher's application of standards rather than the assessment of an individual's performance. Teachers would be required to provide the examiner with access to eg. A and C standard students in a particular activity (eg. basketball). The examiner's task would then be to moderate A and C standards across schools to ensure that teachers are applying the criteria and standards consistently and accurately. If the examiner suspected that the performance did not match the standard of A or C respectively, the portfolio's could be checked in more detail. Once an examiner is satisfied that the school is applying the criteria and standards accurately and consistently with other schools, the marks submitted by the school for all students could be verified by the examiner.

The second issue is ensuring the integration of learning in and about physical activity. This could be done in at least two ways. The first way would be to incorporate some form of oral examination (written would probably be too clumsy and time consuming) in the external examiner's brief that relates directly to the activity (eg. basketball) being performed. This would be very much an on-the-spot question/answer exercise and couldn't require too complex or sophisticated answers. The second way could be to construct examination questions that require students to reflect on and use their first hand experiences of practical physical activity to answer the question in sufficient depth. For example, students might be asked to define the concept of team cohesion, describe a number of strategies used to develop team cohesion that they have used in one of their chosen sports, provide a rationale for the choice of these strategies, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the strategies based on this experience. Unless the student had actually experienced using team cohesion strategies in a practical context, a full and satisfactory answer could not be given.

Conclusion

I am not intending to suggest that Ireland should swallow whole the Queensland approach to assessment in physical education. That would be presumptuous and quite inappropriate. I don't intend either to suggest that the Queensland system is flawless, because that would also be quite incorrect and misleading (Macdonald & Brooker, 1997c). For example, poor teachers do not operate this system successfully, and Queensland has its share of those. What I do intend by this is to provide you with an example of how assessment of student learning can be done in a way that is consistent with a powerful and sophisticated view of learning in the physical domain and can have clear educational benefits for students and professional benefits for teachers. The Queensland example shows what is possible in our subject. It is not to be copied slavishly. It is instead to be studied for the key principles it demonstrates.

One of the most important principles we can take away from the Queensland example is that learning experiences and assessment tasks must be very closely related, often involving simple or minor modifications between one and the other. The key principle operating here is that students should never experience an assessment task for the first time when the teacher is carrying out summative assessment. If you think this principle looks like teaching to the test, then you would be correct, to a degree. The educational issue here is that the test, the assessment tasks, must be built on the solid foundation of the learning experiences rather than the assessment determining the nature of the learning experiences; the assessment tail must not be allowed to wag the curriculum dog

All of this requires a clear statement and understanding of the nature of learning in physical education. It requires recognition that learning is an active, developmental and multi-layered process, that knowledge in and about physical activity must be integrated whenever possible, and that young people's abilities to make sense of learning tasks is a crucial underpinning factor in motivating them to learn. We have the conceptual and technical know how to do assessment well in physical education, to make it work educationally for pupils and teachers. But the job of using these tools and this know-how to make assessment educationally and professionally beneficial in all schools given the existence of a myriad of local differences is, I'm convinced, the major challenge we face today. We may have the know-how, but do we collectively have the open minds and open hearts needed to meet these challenges? I wait and watch with great interest and wish you the very best of good fortune as you seek to meet the challenges of assessment in physical education.

References

Abernethy, B., V. Kippers, L.T. McKinnon, R.J. Neal, and S. Hanrahan. (1996). The Biophysical Foundations of Human Movement. Melbourne: Macmillan.

Arnold, P. (1985) Movement, Physical Education and the Curriculum. Bulletin of Physical Education 16 (1), 5-9

Board of Senior Secondary School Studies (1998) Physical Education: Senior Syllabus. Spring Hill, Brisbane: Author. ISBN: 0 7242 7626 2.

Bunker, D. & Thorpe, R. (1982). A model for the teaching of games in secondary schools. Bulletin of Physical Education, 18 (1), 7-10.

Dodds, P., Griffin, L.L., & Placek, J.H. (2001). A selected review of the literature on development of learners' domain -specific knowledge. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 20, 301-313.

Kirk, D. and Macdonald, D. (1998). Situated Learning in Physical Education. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 17(3), 376-387.

Macdonald, D., Naughtin, G. and Wittwer, N. (2000) Authentic Sociology in Secondary School Physical Education, pp. 187-200 in Jones, R.L. & Armour, K.M. (Eds.) Sociology of Sport: Theory and Practice. Harlow: Pearson.

Macdonald, D. and Brooker, R. (1997a). Becoming Physically Educated in High School: A Program Review. ICHPER Journal, 33(3), 60-63.

Macdonald, D. and Brooker, R. (1997b). Accountability Issues in a Performance-based Subject: A Case Study of Senior Physical Education. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 23(1), 83-102.

Macdonald, D. and Brooker, R. (1997c). Moving Beyond the Crisis in Secondary Physical Education: An Australian Initiative. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 16(2), 155-175.

Rovegno, I., Nevett, M., & Babiarz, M. (2001). Learning and teaching of invasion-game tactics in fourth grade: Introduction and theoretical perspective. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 20, 341-351.

Rovegno, I. and Kirk, D. (1995) Articulations and Silences in Socially Critical Work on Physical Education: Toward a Broader Agenda. Quest, 47 (4), 447-474.

Acknowledgement

Thank you to Kathy Armour, Trish Glasby, Doune Macdonald, Ann MacPhail and Jacinta O'Brien for their helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this presentation. The shortcomings that remain are entirely my responsibility.