Students' Gendered Constructions of Fitness Knowledge Through Fitness Testing Experiences

Background/Purpose: Critical theorists argue that discursive practices contribute to the ways in which individuals create knowledge about what cultures expect for their bodies and physicality. It is through these discursive practices in schooling experiences that students construct meaning and knowledge. Fitness testing is one component of the physical education domain that has received limited research attention, especially when considering the gendered-aspects of knowledge construction. The purpose of this study was to investigate two research questions: 1) Are 5th grade students who participated in either the President's Challenge Physical Fitness Test [PCPFT] or FITNESSGRAM cognizant of the different expectations for girls and boys? and 2) How was gender-related fitness knowledge constructed by the students?

Method: The participants in this study were twenty-four 5th grade students (12 girls, 12 boys). Six students from four different school sites (2 PCPFT, 2 FITNESSGRAM), after completing all parts of the fitness testing programs, participated in a 20-30 minute audiotaped interview, which included a combination of a standardized, open-ended interview protocol along with an interview guide approach (Patton, 2002). After all interviews were transcribed verbatim, the data were analyzed inductively. All interviews were read closely and carefully allowing line-by-line open-coding to occur. Following the multiple readings, the data were reduced into prevailing themes. Trustworthiness was obtained through member checks with participants, acknowledgement of researcher bias, and triangulation.

Analysis/Results: In regard to the first research question, of the 24 students, only eight (all girls; 6 “fit”, 2 “low fit”) of the participants were cognizant of the divergent gender expectations. For the second research question, two themes emerged that represent how students constructed gender-related knowledge about fitness. It is important to note that there were no differences across the two fitness testing programs. First, knowledge about gender-related conceptions of fitness was created by the students based on their schooling experiences, various modes of popular culture, familial expectations/roles, and historically-situated events that served to establish and perpetuate boys and girls as essentially different. Second, the students' positioning within the two different testing programs allowed the students to produce knowledge and meaning that led to restricted bodily movements.

Conclusions: These articulations of how knowledge is constructed coupled with restricted bodily movements clearly demonstrate the importance of exploring how students experience gendered fitness testing practices. Exploring this intersection of pedagogy and theory can yield important findings that can guide efforts to reconceptualize gendered fitness testing practices.