Physical Education In Schools: Pros And Cons

Categories: Physical Education Physical Fitness

Essay, Pages 3 (502 words)

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It is said that a sound body has a sound mind. The present age of technology and invention tends to prevent the person to move. For a person to be physically active for a lifetime, needs an increase in physical activity, knowledge, and skills since childhood. To promote physical education at the school level, a positive attitude towards physical education and resourceful physical facilities are required. As PE lessons are without pressure of academic success, students show a more positive attitude towards PE (Koca et al.

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, 2005). In past years, a lot of researches have been conducted to explore the attitude of students towards PE at school (Van Wersch, Trew, Turner, 1992; Carlson, 1995; Ennis, 1996; Portman, 1995; Koca, AMc0, & Demirhan, 2005). Many of the researches compared to gender and age in developing attitudes towards PE (Colley, Berman, MOllOngen, 2005; Folsom-Meek, 1992; Smoll & Schultz, 1980, Birtwistle & Brodie, 1991; Hicks, Wiggns, Crist & Moode, 2001).

Over the last two decades, numerous researches explored the relationship between assessment and learning. The researches indicate that a good AFL is one of the most used assessment tools to drive students’ learning and teachers’ teaching (Black and Wiliam, 1998a, 1998b; Gardner, 2012; Hattie, 2009; Hattie and Timperley, 2007; Klenowski and Wyatt-Smith, 2014; Sadler, 1998).

AFL has been defined as ‘... the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there (Assessment Reform Group, 2002: 2).

The existing literature in PE increasingly recommends the implementation of AFL to enhance students’ learning and teachers’ teaching strategies (Georgakis and Wilson, 2012; Green, 2008; Hay, 2006; Hay and Penney, 2013; MacPhail and Halbert, 2010).

There is an extensive literature available that focuses on exploring the attitude of teachers and students towards Physical Education (Sarwar, Hussain, Mehmood & Awan, 2010; Arabaci, 2009; Zeng, Weng & Weng, 2016), and most of the research studies are limited to either age, gender or class preferences of students and teachers towards PE (Sarwar, Hussain, Mehmood & Awan, 2010; Arabic, 2009; Zeng, Weng & Weng, 2016, Liang, Y. H., Zhang, J. L., Cui, Y. B., & Yuan, R. (2016). The literature available in the assessment of PE mainly focuses on teachers’ perspectives, with less attention to students’ perceptions. (Chan et al., 2011; Hay and Penney, 2013; Zhu, 2015).

To the best of our knowledge, we found a study by Leirhaug (2015) that explored the relationship between students’ grades and assessment in Norwegian upper secondary schools. This study was basically a trial to explore the relationship between students’ grades and AFL in the Norwegian context and their results showed a negative relationship. There is no such study conducted in Pakistan. This gap makes our study imperative. Moreover, there is a study conducted by Sarwar, Hussain, Mehmood, and Awan (2010) that explored teachers’ attitudes towards physical education in public schools in Gujranwala, Pakistan. Since their participants were teachers and they were just 52 and the questionnaire they adapted consisted of 38 Likert-type items, the data itself was way too little. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap in the literature and explores the relationship between students’ grades and AFL in PE at Private Secondary schools in Karachi, Pakistan.