Assessing Pupil Progress In PE
by Business Partner Harry Kent
For those of you in roles surrounding PE will know, the recent ‘will they – won’t they’ matter of extending Sports Premium Funding left many of us in a little bit of a panic! My school had meetings asking what will happen if the funding is cut, and what will it mean
for the planning, delivery and assessment of PE in the school.
Luckily, the funding has been extended through to the end of the 2019/2020 academic year as far as we know at the time of writing. However, it left me with a clear message about what OFSTED and the government were after from PE – Sustainability! We should all be looking at ways in which we can use the funding to create a lasting impact on the children.
We know that one way that we can use the funding to create a legacy of better PE is to upskill our staff, and we have. But, nearly all of the training we have provided teachers with is how to plan, how to deliver great lessons. I want to take a moment in this blog to try and aid teachers and coaches in how to ‘Assess Pupil Progress in PE’.
So how do we go about assessing progress? Well, firstly, I would suggest that you need to know the period of how long you want to assess a child’s progress over. Is it a year, a term, a lesson?
Once you know that, the next step is finding out what the child or children should be learning across that period. For example, a class may have this schedule for PE for the term;
Year 4 – Squirrels Class
Autumn 1 – Cricket
Autumn 2 – Dance
Spring 1 – Gymnastics
Spring 2 – Football
Summer 1 – Tennis
Summer 2 – Athletics
Knowing what they are going to be learning is vital to the next step in being able to track pupil progress.
Baseline Assessments
In order to track progress, we need to understand where children are at when they begin their learning, so we are going to provide the children with a set of core tasks to attempt. Then we can revisit those tasks after the children have learnt about the sport in PE, and this will give us an indication of any progress they’ve made.
How we go about creating these core tasks though is vitally important. Here are some tips for coming up with core tasks for baseline assessing;
Use Your Scheme Of Work – This will often give you an idea of what the children should be able to do. But it’s only a guide.
Take A Skills Based Approach – Find the skill the is at the centre of your lesson, not the result, for example the winning team in cricket will be decided by who gets the most runs, but the core task isn’t running, because if a team can’t hit the ball they aren’t going to be able to bat. If they can’t bat, they’ll scarcely get the opportunity to run. So the core task is batting in that example. Once again, you can use the scheme of work to identify your key skill. Then give them a core task to perform.
Recordable – Could your core task be physically recorded; numerically recorded, for example. How many times can you do this out of ten? How many can you do in a minute? How far? How high? etc.
It doesn’t have to be physically recorded, sometimes I just use a ‘drop your hand when I get to your number’ system. The first and the last few hands are the ones at this stage I’m really interested in. Why? Because I can find my Emerging & Greater Depth Learners roughly.
For Dance & Gymnastics, it can be tough to numerically record a core task, so could you use photo or video evidence during the core task, which you can then compare to video of the same task later in the term?
Describe & Explain – Finally, I use one of my greater depth learners to demonstrate how to perform the core task well, I ask the children to describe what he’s doing, and explain why that makes it successful. This is the assessment of children’s knowledge of the subject matter. It’s important because some children may have a fantastic understand of what to do, the just can perform it technically.
Assessing In Practices
Now we’ve established baseline abilities, we are able to start tracking progress, the first way is to observe the children in practice. We want to assess in practice because it gives us a better opportunity to watch the children doing isolated skills, rather than in games when lots of other things are going on. Some of the things that will assist you are;
Understand The Assessment Criteria – You don’t have to know it by heart, take a note, take a print-out, take an iPad onto the playground or the field. But knowing the assessment criteria is really important because it will allow you to identify what to look for to assess whether or not a child is emerging, meeting or greater depth.
Develop ‘Assessment-Friendly’ Practices – For Example, one Year 3 Cricket Assessment Criteria is – to strike a bowled ball using different types of shot. So I might create a practice like this;
A big square, four different coloured cones. Stump in the middle of the square. When a bowler bowls from a certain colour, the batter must play a certain shot, for example, block, drive, sweep or slog. This isolates the idea of using different shots.
Understand What Differentiates Emerging, Meeting & Exceeding Learners –
This is difficult because there are many elements to that some criteria. Can they retrieve within their area & throw to a certain position based upon the state of play? Can they relay?
So we as teachers need to have a good understanding of the rules of the game and how they affect the children’s decision making. From there we can understand their thought process, and assess their ability to field as a team.
Assessing In Gameplay/Matchplay
Assessing in gameplay is critically important, because sometimes, no matter how well a child can demonstrate a technical skill, in a game, they may make poor decisions, they may may not execute the skill as well under pressure, they may not be of the same level that you assessed them to be during practice.
Conversely, there may be a child that can do execute the technical skills averagely, but in a game, they understand their strengths and weaknesses better, they have a better understanding of where other children will be, they may make very good decisions.
So here are some things that you could consider to allow you to better assess your children ‘in game’;
Conditioned Games – This is basically adding or taking away a single or multiple rules or regulations in order to give you a quicker, easier route to the things you want to see in order to assess. For example, I may decide to put a rule in place that each child has to play a different position after a set amount of minutes. If I know that one child can pass particularly well, but I have no idea about how effectively they can shoot, this will help.
Stop & Start – Sometimes the difficulty we have assessing in-game is that you want to know why a child made a decision, because it contradicts what you thought you about their ability. The problem is, by the time you get to question them about it, the situation or scenario may have vanished. But you didn’t want to stop play.
Feel free to stop the game to give yourself an opportunity to assess, for example, I may want to ask Charlie why he decided to throw the ball to another fielder when he was 20 yards away from the wicket keeper?
If he answers, ‘because I wanted to get to the bowlers end which was further away, I didn’t want to throw it all the way to the bowlers end because I didn’t think my throwing was accurate enough over that distance so I took the less risky option to throw to a relay player who could cut the distance in half and together we could make two accurate throws to get the ball to the bowlers end and give ourselves as a team the chance to get the batter running towards the bowlers end out’ then it was worth me stopping the game for a second to know that he’s demonstrating Greater Depth understanding of how to field as a team.
By this point, you have given a baseline assessment, you’ve assessed in practice and in gameplay, so how do you know that the progress you’ve assessed is correct?
Go back to your baseline assessment and see if children can produce an improved result.
Lastly, what if I’ve delivered 6 weeks of Cricket and I don’t see any progress? Like any other subject, it’s fine to sometimes see little or no progress, because that’s something that we can still input in Insight and gain an understanding of what a child is good at and what they aren’t.
Thanks for reading!
