Fitness Testing in Primary Schools
I will now attempt to put an argument for not testing in primary PE...
For myself, the word testing is enough to make me let out a little grown. For some students, when it's used in conjunction with the word fitness it's enough to make them limp off to the nurse, or in some cases have sleepless nights. Now this definitely isn't all students, as you will always have a handful of athletes willing to compete who just love the tests. But I'm guessing they are the handful of students that excel at fitness testing.
Fitness testing does have a time and a place, I'm just not sure it should be done during primary school PE lessons. Don't we preach that play and inquiry are key to the development of the child and yet we make them sit through tests that were originally designed for adults and are incredibly prescriptive?
But, you do the test. You record the students heights and weights and you put them through a series of designer challenges in order to collect data. Why? So you can let the overweight or unfit child know they are overweight or unfit? I'm kinda guessing that the child already knows, and doesn't need a beautiful printout stating the obvious.
For myself, the word testing is enough to make me let out a little grown. For some students, when it's used in conjunction with the word fitness it's enough to make them limp off to the nurse, or in some cases have sleepless nights. Now this definitely isn't all students, as you will always have a handful of athletes willing to compete who just love the tests. But I'm guessing they are the handful of students that excel at fitness testing.
Fitness testing does have a time and a place, I'm just not sure it should be done during primary school PE lessons. Don't we preach that play and inquiry are key to the development of the child and yet we make them sit through tests that were originally designed for adults and are incredibly prescriptive?
But, you do the test. You record the students heights and weights and you put them through a series of designer challenges in order to collect data. Why? So you can let the overweight or unfit child know they are overweight or unfit? I'm kinda guessing that the child already knows, and doesn't need a beautiful printout stating the obvious.
What's Just Happened
Personally, as a professional physical education teacher I think I can recognise if my students need to improve their fitness or lose weight. Hopefully I can target these issues by promoting a healthy active lifestyle, and by making the most of the time I have within PE. Additionally, you always have to keep in mind that there's a good chance that over the next couple of years as students grow their body types change. The slightly overweight child in grade 5 could become the class athlete by grade 7 or 8. Particularly if you've given them a love for being active and staying healthy!Missing Our Primary Audience
I think we're missing our audience by fitness testing in primary school.The top athletes love the multi stage fitness test because they do well in it! But they are not the students we want or need to get up and running, because they are already internally motivated.
Our target audience are the ones that don't do particularly well in the tests, the ones that need help in getting motivated, and/or are too shy about being tested in front of their peers.
I have to argue that if fitness testing is the way we are introducing a love for life long fitness into primary schools, we are doing the majority of our students a disservice.
Instead we should be promoting the understanding that fitness and exercise are fun! As PE educators we talk about how we should be developing a love for exercise, games and sports that should be with students a lifetime.
Case in point, when I was at university we worked closely with Great Ormond Street Hospital, helping medically obese children. Our number one priority was to get them back to enjoying being active: playing tag, capture the flag etc, not sticking them through boring fitness tests that already told us what we already knew.
I could go on about fitness testing in primary schools, and I certainly could play devils advocate.
My belief as a PE specialist is that we need to introduce healthy life style concepts at an early age. We need to make fitness and exercise fun so they become positively integrated into students lifestyles. Then, as students grow and develop the introduction to more commercialized fitness tests, particularly when linked with sport makes more sense.
