Assessment and evaluation in physical education and sports

Assessment plays an important role in the teaching-learning process as it allows teachers to make inferences about student learning and provides teachers with insight into the effectiveness of their own teaching. Assessment results can be used for accountability purposes and inform educational improvements. At the same time, assessment in PE contains multiple challenges and has been identified as one of the most difficult tasks that PE teachers have in daily practice. Research within the last two decades indicates that the overall quality of assessment in PE could be improved. Assessment in contemporary PE often takes place at the end of a lesson unit with the purpose of determining the learning yield relative to the learning outcomes. This is also known as summative assessment. However, assessment can also be employed during a lesson unit with the purpose of
supporting student learning, which is known as formative assessment. Through strategies such as feed up, feedback and feed forward and by actively involving students in the assessment process students are enabled to self-regulate their learning. As both formative and summative assessment serve important purposes in the teaching-learning process, PE teachers should strive to find an optimal balance between these when designing a learning trajectory. The principles of backward design can enable PE teachers to realise a curriculum in which there is an optimal alignment between learning outcomes, assessment and learning activities. Regardless of what type of assessment is being used, all assessment within PE should meet the quality criteria of relevance, validity, reliability, and transparency, while ensuring adequate time for learning. The concept of assessment literacy provides an overview of the skills and knowledge needed for PE teachers to successfully engage with assessment and could serve as a
framework for further thinking about and developing PE assessment