Traditional assessment practices in college activity courses typically involve paper-and-pencil type activities (written exams, essays, papers) augmented with applicable skills tests. In addition, grading in college Physical Education has not been very rigorous, focusing on attendance, effort, and participation. Historically, it appears that students’ perception of collegiate physical education courses is “show up, try hard, and get an easy “A””.
Initial attempts of combining portfolios and Sport Education have shown considerable alignment between students’ perceptions of and experiences with completing team portfolios and the purposes and outcomes of sport education (Kinchin, 2001). Current technological advances offer exciting and new venues for the development of authentic assessment. One route appears to be in the direction of web-based group portfolios. The purpose of this study was to describe and evaluate the introduction of web-based team portfolios within the context of collegiate physical education classes.
During the course of three Sport Education volleyball seasons, teams were required to design and maintain a team website, including entry page, statistics, biographies, commitment, coach’s corner, and game reports. Students designed, published, and updated the webpages according to their team roles (e.g., statistician, reporter, coach). The team webmaster was responsible for overall guidance.
Two data sources were used in this study; analysis of webpages and questionnaires. Four independent evaluators examined the webpages of five randomly selected teams and used a grading criterion to compare web contents with the objectives of Sport Education. At the end of the semester students completed a six-item questionnaire with open responses concerning their enjoyment, affiliation, and learning how to develop and publish webpages.
The results demonstrated that the websites strongly captured the objectives of the Sport Education model. Independent experts agreed that the websites depicted all six characteristics of the sport education model (seasons, culminating event, affiliation, record keeping, festivity, and formal competition). From student responses, five main themes developed: "development of team collegiality," "we've never done anything like this before -- anywhere in college," "too much work for Physical Education," "picking up teammates’ slackness," and "the need for additional time within the time frame of the class." These data suggest that the development of group portfolios in the form of team websites positively contribute to the objectives of the sport education and raise the sophistication of authentic assessment. While the results of using web-based group portfolios are encouraging, further descriptive investigation is warranted with respect to students’ perceptions of activity courses.