Students’ experiences during their early schooling – when and who should assess schoolchildren’s physical education

Abstract

Scientific literature has pointed out the need to develop formative and shared assessment models at university due to the benefits and advantages they present to the improvement of student learning, but also for their contribution to the development of professional skills for future teachers, which is a facilitating element when applying it in their professional practice. One of the factors to be considered in order to analyze the assessment models that the pre-service teacher education students have experienced is when it takes place; however, evidence in this sense is still scarce. The objective of the study is to explore the perspectives of Primary Education Teachers’ Education students in the assessments in Physical Education (PE) during their primary and secondary school stages. The study focused on at what moments of the teaching-learning process was the assessment carried out and what was the participation of the students in the assessment process. A qualitative study was carried out in which 45 pre-service teacher education Spanish students participated during the academic year 2014/15. Each participant wrote an autobiographical account of their experiences and participated in two discussion groups. The results highlight the tendency to hold assessments at different times, according to the type of knowledge in question: a) continuous assessment for the attitudinal field; b) final assessment for the conceptual field (theory). The procedural aspect varied between the continuous assessment of motor skills and games, the final assessment for sports content and the sum of specific assessments for physical condition. It can thus be concluded that the students’ assessment systems in PE were aligned with the traditional models of technical curricular perspectives.