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

Issue: May/June 2009

Content Development: Using Application Tasks to Celebrate and Calibrate
Murray Mitchell

Abstract: When teachers develop content that will lead to student learning—rather than simply keeping students busy, happy and good—they use a variety of tasks. Sequencing task challenges in progressively higher levels of difficulty and including refining tasks enhances student learning. A common task-development error seems to involve the use of a series of loosely related extension tasks, rather than progressively more complex extensions, and then one or more application tasks. There is rarely a theme to the extensions, there are few if any refining tasks, and application tasks are frequently left to stand on their own. That is, there seems to be a lack of feedback or accountability for task performance. This article draws attention to the importance of celebrating student performance to serve as an accountability measure and to emphasize the joy of movement, and to calibrate or make instructional decisions based on student performance. Examples are provided to illustrate how different student performances should result in different content development and how instructors can adapt and modify their plans based on student responses.

Article category: Teaching