Time spent in PE lessons
- Activity level during recess and lunch breaks
- Time spent outside when the child is away from school
- Involvement in community sports programs
One study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used what’s referred to as the Youth Risk Behaviour Surveillance System (YRBSS) to monitor the general health of children by conducting several surveys – one at national level, as well as local school-based surveys conducted by state.
One of the findings from the combined results of these surveys was that nationwide, 56% of students had played on at least one sports team run by a local community group or their school. Based on their popularity alone, these certainly shouldn’t be discounted as a source of exercise, and would be an excellent addition to a school’s teaching plan if not already implemented.
This is also why it can be extremely important to offer extra-curricular sports clubs after school, which can cover anything from dance to American football. Incidentally, the CDC is another of the organizations that supports the recommendation of at least 150 minutes per week of physical exercise for children.
How to perform the assessments
Performing regular assessments on how much the children’s physical fitness has improved is important for many reasons. This isn’t just to validate whether or not your current lesson plan is effective, but also to identify and resolve any issues that may be causing the students to lose interest in the program.
The assessments themselves can be performed in a variety of ways, whether that be formal, informal, or process-orientated. Peer reviews are also an option, whereby the children evaluate each other on their performances, although these may require a little more management and planning.
The following list of resources should be able to provide you with some ideas on how to go about performing your own physical fitness assessments.
5 Useful resources for assessing student fitness
- 1. Monitoring Student Fitness Levels
A useful PDF document 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 FITNES