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Assessment in Invasion Games I An Introduction

This document introduces a blog post series about assessing student learning in invasion games like basketball, soccer, and hockey. Traditionally, teachers make assumptions about the best and worst players based on observations, but this is not authentic assessment. The author argues that assessment needs to capture the constantly changing environment of invasion games and look for specific indicators of success. In upcoming posts, the author will share the research, tools, and data they used to authentically assess students during an invasion games unit.

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Eric Sun
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83 views2 pages

Assessment in Invasion Games I An Introduction

This document introduces a blog post series about assessing student learning in invasion games like basketball, soccer, and hockey. Traditionally, teachers make assumptions about the best and worst players based on observations, but this is not authentic assessment. The author argues that assessment needs to capture the constantly changing environment of invasion games and look for specific indicators of success. In upcoming posts, the author will share the research, tools, and data they used to authentically assess students during an invasion games unit.

Uploaded by

Eric Sun
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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4/11/23, 10:18 PM Assessment in Invasion Games: Part One - An Introduction - iPhys-Ed.

com

Assessment In Invasion Games: Part One – An


Introduction
/ All, Assessment / By Nathan Horne

Team sports have traditionally made up a large part of any physical education program. Sports like
basketball, football (soccer, American, Australian, Gaelic), handball, rugby and hockey are favourites in
gymnasiums and on fields worldwide. All of these sports fall under the category of Invasion Games,
where players try to maintain possession of an object, keeping it away from their opponents to move
into a scoring position.

Students typically love playing these sports, or versions of them, and teachers find them easy to set up
and run within their lessons. It is also generally easy to see who the “strongest” (scores all the points)
and “weakest” (doesn’t touch the ball) players are within this context. The problem is that often this is as
physical education teachers we constantly make observations about who the “strongest” players are
and who is finding it difficult, but theses observations are more often that not just assumptions.

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4/11/23, 10:18 PM Assessment in Invasion Games: Part One - An Introduction - iPhys-Ed.com

Flinders University Associate Professor, and my good friend, Shane Pill has suggested that  “assessment
of games and sport in physical education has often not been authentic.” and that “assumptions should
be authenticated with authentic evidence of student learning.”  Every time that we make an assumption
that Student X is the “best player” so they must have the best tactical knowledge and understanding of
the game we are reinforcing this inauthentic assessment.

In their book, Doherty & Brenna argue that physical education has traditionally been a relatively “data-
poor” environment because of an absence of effective strategies to capture what learning has taken
place. Brown & Hopper also suggest that as physical educators, too often we attempt to measure
pyschomotor competence in games units through skill tests, and we create contexts that mitigate
against student success no matter how much effort they exert. By using simple skill test reliant
assessments & observation rubrics implemented at the end of a unit we are failing to authentically
assess student performance.

The nature of Invasion Games, like basketball, football and hockey, is such that participants are engaged
in a constantly changing environment, continually requiring planning and effective problem
solving. How do you account for this constantly chaotic environment? How do you implement an
assessment when every single time you observe it is going to look different?
I believe the key lies in looking for very specific indicators of success within a given game which will
always be present, no matter how chaotic the game looks.
From Research to Practice: An assessment journey
This post is the first in a series of blog posts detailing how I aimed to use proven physical education
research to change the way I assessed student learning in invasion games. Over the coming weeks I will
be explaining in detail the research, assessment tools, learning activities and finally looking at the data
that I collected to help me get a more authentic picture of student learning during my invasion games
unit.

Next week I will be blogging about the resources and tools I used to assess the students during the unit
and sharing templates which you can use in your physical education classes. Stay tuned!

Click here to read part two of the Assessment in Invasion Games blog series.

Want to make sure that you do not miss any upcoming posts in this series? All you need to do
is subscribe here to have every new post delivered straight to your inbox. 

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