ABSTRACT
As a PE teacher assessment is an essential part of your teaching. You want to find out how much your pupils have learnt. You can only do this by assessing their work. This can range from the very informal comment of ‘well done!’ as a result of a judgement made about a handstand, to the formal assessment involved in the marking of examination work (e.g. General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), General Certificate of Education (GCE) Advanced Subsidiary (AS) or Advanced (A) level work). Much of your assessment focuses on pupils’ actions in performance. Actions are often fleeting and PE teachers have to rely on their ability to observe and judge at the time of the performance. Video recording is being used increasingly to record pupil performance – normally for formal summative assessment – but this is not usually practical when instant feedback is required when assessing for learning in an ongoing way in every lesson or if the environment is not conducive to the use of electrical equipment. Teachers of other subjects usually have a permanent record of pupils’ achievement in the form of writing or other finished products. This is not usually the case in PE. You need to understand the principles of assessment, but an additional requirement is to refine your skills of observation (see Chapter 4).
