ent produced by the Presidential Youth Fitness Program (PYFP), which takes a comprehensive look at assessing a student’s physical fitness levels.
This includes recommendations for collecting student fitness data at state level, safeguards for monitoring student fitness levels, and an overview of which states are currently reporting fitness testing data back to the state education agency or state health department.
PYFP are actually one of the many organizations to adopt the FITNESSGRAM software as a tool for schools to assess the health-related fitness of students, and is another of our recommended resources.
- 2. SPARK Webinar: Fitness Assessment in Physical Education
Despite being recorded in January 2012, this particular webinar is one of the most relevant that SPARK have produced in relation to fitness assessments for Physical Education classes.
Lasting just over an hour, the webinar is quite comprehensive in the topics that it covers, which includes how to appropriately assess student fitness levels, tools for self-monitoring, and how the assessments fit into a high quality physical education program.
This particular SPARK webinar also features Shellie Y.Pfohl, M.S. – Executive Director of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition – as a guest speaker.
- 3. FITNESSGRAM Physical Fitness Testing
As a comprehensive educational, reporting, and promotional tool created by the Cooper Institute (the same group that developed the Cooper International Fitness Test later in our list), FITNESSGRAM has gained increasingly popularity amongst schools and universities across the country.
The software has 3 main goals; to assess, to report, and to educate. From an assessment standpoint, teachers are able to select the testing method they feel is most appropriate from the multiple options on offer, then either enter the children’s scores for them, or allow the children to enter their own scores. This is an excellent example of the self-assessment method we mentioned earlier.
At a recent count, 50-60,000 FITNESSGRAM licenses had been issued to education agencies, schools, and institutions across almost every state in the US, including being designated as the Physical Fitness Test (PFT) of choice for students in California public schools, and the assessment tool of choice for the Texas Education Agency.
FITNESSGRAM is part of a suite of tools that can also include ACTIVITYGRAM and NUTRIGRAM
- 4. Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI)
Whereas FITNESSGRAM is a software that can compile data electronically to a central resource, the OSPI has developed assessments for health and fitness that can be used throughout the year by teachers in the classroom.
These are primarily used to gauge student understanding of the physical education program as the year progresses, also providing teachers with student copies of pre-written tests for the assessments.
Resources are available for all levels of schooling, from Elementary, through to Middle School, and concluding with High School.
- 5. Cooper International Fitness Test
The Cooper International Fitness Test is a customizable fitness assessment software created by the same company that created FITNESSGRAM.
What sets this particular software apart is that it’s developed on a much larger scale, customized to report on health-related fitness levels of schoolchildren on a countrywide level.
One of the most recent customizations was recently adopted by Hungary, who are now using a version known as NETFIT. This was launched in the fall of 2014, with the goal of reaching 1.2 million children in 4,000 schools across the country, in an effort to establish a national framework for student fitness assessments.
Quick guide to getting qualified
If you’re considering becoming a PE teacher yourself, it can also be useful to know which qualifications are needed. But in order to provide you with an accurate plan, it’s important to take into account the level of education you eventually want to be teaching.
PE is undoubtedly one of the most rewarding subjects to teach. Although in mos