American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance - AAHPERD

 Issue: January 2006

Integrating Assessment and Instruction: Easing the Process with PDAs
Heidi Wegis & Hans van der Mars

Abstract:
More school districts are being required to demonstrate that their students are reaching state standards and benchmarks. In order to demonstrate student learning and the achievement of the standards and benchmarks, physical education instructors need to determine what should be assessed and how to perform these assessments. Authentic assessments encourage teachers to find meaningful ways to gather and record information regarding their students’ strengths and weaknesses. The emergence of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) offers important advantages that can make these time-consuming tasks much less burdensome. This article provides examples of two templates that teachers can set up for performing on-going integrated assessments of students’ in-class performance. These include a template for collecting and storing assessment data on students’ physical activity levels and a template for collecting data on students’ skill-learning and overall in-class behavior. The templates were created with the intent of easing the process of performing assessments in the physical education setting.

Article category: Technology