The health-related fitness (HRF) content knowledge of samples of middle school physical education teachers, inservice and preservice teachers has been found to be less than optimal on artificial paper and pencil assessments (Ayers, 2002; Castelli & Williams, 2007; Miller & Housner, 1998). In spite of lackluster performance, teacher confidence that they know the material has been found to be high (Castelli & Williams, 2007). Cognitive psychologists may offer insight to explain this apparent disconnect. Anderson (1995) characterizes declarative knowledge as descriptions of facts, methods, procedures—the kinds of things measured on a paper and pencil tests. In contrast, procedural knowledge is manifest in the doing of something—or the ability to apply HRF knowledge in the daily work of teaching. The purpose of this study was to examine teacher performance on an authentic task—an alternative measurement approach to assess procedural rather than declarative knowledge—to determine the functional level of HRF content knowledge by high school teachers.
Method
High school students in a required physical education course must complete a contract to engage in physical activity for a minimum of 20 minutes per episode, 3 days per week across at least 6 weeks, and to identify what HRF component(s) their contracted activity will address. Teachers then grade contracts and submit copies of all student work along with teacher comments for analysis. All teachers submitting data from 50 high schools representing approximately one-third of the high schools in one state were sampled; a portion of an ongoing program of assessment.
Analysis/Results
Results indicated that while there were falsely accepted contracts (inaccurate or incomplete data provided by students), and correctly rejected contracts, the majority of contracts were correctly accepted by teachers. These results for teachers were independent of overall performance scores by teachers (range 0% to 100% on four performance indicators—movement competence, HRF cognitive test, outside activity contracts, and FitnessGram scores) and weighted school scores (range 13.04% to 98.34%--a total score based on performance on the four performance indicators).
Conclusions
The confidence displayed by teachers may be founded upon their ability to apply relevant information to tasks demanded of them in their teaching. That is, their procedural knowledge allows them to perform at an appropriate professional level, in contrast to the way they have been portrayed previously in the literature. Significant is the possibility that measurement error rather than incompetence may explain some previous findings assailing physical education teacher reputations.