Although “Demonstrates understanding of movement concepts, principles, strategies, …” is part of the national physical education (PE) standards (NASPE, 2004), there is no updated standardized test to assess students' fitness and health knowledge available. A major effort, therefore, was made to develop a standardized National Fitness Knowledge Test (NFKT) to assess high school students' basic knowledge about physical activity, fitness and health. This paper presents item development and pilot testing of that NFKT.
Method
The Fitness for Life textbook written by Corbin and Lindsay (2007) was used as the knowledge source base for developing the test questions/items. A table of specifications was first developed to identify the categories of content areas and to help decide the relative importance of each category. An initial pool of 160 items was created by trained item writers and items were set into seven testing forms (40 items per form with 20 common items across all forms) with balanced content areas. These forms were then administered to 1,708 high school students across the United States and their background information (e.g., age, gender, physical activity level, etc.) were collected. Collected data were analyzed using conventional items analysis for items' difficulty (P) and discrimination (D).
Analysis/Results
The P-value ranged from 0.047 to 0.9 (M=0.34, SD = ±0.19) and D-value ranged from -0.0138 to 0.719 (0.23±0.20) Based on P- and D-values, items were evaluated and classified as either “Good” (keep), “Revise” (fix and keep) or “Discard.” Sixty-nine items were kept, 52 were revised, and 39 were discarded. Of the items that were kept or revised, 20 came from the content category “Getting Started,” 17 “Becoming and Staying Physically Active,” 22 “Physical Activity Pyramid: Level 2 Activities,” 26 “Physical Activity Pyramid: Level 3 Activities,” 22 “Healthy Choices,” and 14 “Wellness and Personal Program Planning.”
Conclusions
A set of items with good item difficulty and discrimination was developed for the NFKT and they are ready for the next “calibration” stage.
Acknowledgement: The project is sponsored by Human Kinetics.