Purpose: Following the South Carolina Physical Education Assessment Program (SCPEAP) that first defined and assessed high school programs (Mitchell, Castelli, & Strainer, 2003), legislation has supported requiring assessment of elementary and middle school programs. This study reports the results of the first cycle of middle school assessment data.
Methods: SCPEAP data were acquired for analysis. Overall combined scores for each school (N=63) and teacher (N=116) in addition to school and teacher scores on four performance indicators (PIs) were examined.
Analysis/Results: Descriptive statistics were calculated at school and teacher levels. For schools, the mean combined score and each PI were 53.2 ± 21.04 overall, 53.7 ± 24.8 for movement form competence, 69.6 ± 24.3 for fitness knowledge, 53.4 ± 30.9 for out of class physical activity, and 31.2 ± 29.3 on health-related fitness testing. Correlations between the mean school scores and the school poverty index were significant and negative; overall r= -.38; movement form competence r= -.27; fitness knowledge r= -.28; out of class physical activity r= -.24; and health-related fitness testing r = -.39 (p<.05). Separate ANOVAs were used to determine if certain teacher characteristics were related to the scores. In terms of overall scores, teachers who attended standards based instruction workshops scored significantly higher (M=57.9 ± 21.9) than teachers who did not attend the workshops: (M=46.9 ± 23.6, F(115) = 6.76, p<.01). In terms of individual PIs, the students of female teachers, teachers who attended data collection training, and teachers who attended standards based instruction workshops scored higher in all four PIs but was only significantly higher on the fitness knowledge score (female teachers: M= 80.21 ± 18.0; male teachers M=69.3 ± 29.7; F(108) = 5.14, p<.05; teachers who attended data collection training sessions: M=76.6 ± 24.2, teachers who did not attend: M=64.4 ± 30.1, F(115)=5.47, p<.05, and teachers who attended standards based instruction workshops: M=78.9 ± 17.1, teachers who did not attend: M=65.1 ± 33.8, F(115) = 8.11, p<.01).
Conclusions: These findings are consistent with the first cycle of high school teacher data in regards to gender, professional development, and data collection training. Further investigation is needed to determine why the fitness knowledge scores were significant across all three characteristics. A novel finding from this study was that school poverty index was negatively related to school performance in physical education, suggesting that poverty may be a risk factor for program success.