Bollspel som underlag för betyg i Idrott och Hälsa : En studie om likvärdig betygssättning

Sammanfattning: Abstract As part of the 1990;s school reform one aim was to reinforce the objective of knowledge, and physical education and health (PE) went from being a recreational subject to a subject of knowledge among others. As part of the reform a new criterion-referenced grading system was introduced. Several studies and reports since, has shown that teachers in PE have a hard time interpreting and implementing the national criteria in relation to a very traditional content, mainly consisting of ball games. Consequently, fair and equivalent grading in the subject have been questioned. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the dominance of ball games as content, together with teacher’s difficulty in interpreting national grading criteria, impacts equivalent grading in PE. The study is carried out with a didactic and curriculum-theory framework, using survey as method. In the survey the respondents were to make an assessment of three different students, using the same marks used in the national grading system. As a basis for the assessment, three movieclips containing twelve students from a seventh grade class, playing basketball were used. The selection of respondents were 17 licensed teachers from upper- secondary school. The results show a remarkably low conformity among the respondents, where the same performance was graded differently by different respondents. Attached to each assessment the respondents were to formulate their grounds for the grade given. These motivations seem to consist of a mix of languages, partly resembling that of the curriculum and syllabus, and partly resembling that of traditional sports-logic. The latter seems harder to seperate from the specific activity being assessed, and does not seem to reflect the more universal description of quality in movement used in the syllabus. I conclude in my discussion that my results indicate that verbally formulated criteria can be questioned as a method for measuring students’ knowledge in a high-stakes grading system. Where such a method lacks, other frame factors seem to exercise influence over the teachers grading practices, threatening reliability as well as validity of the grades. As a conclusion, I can establish that the dominance of ball games as content in PE may result in grades being given without reliable and valid basis. Dominance of one activity also seems to favour certain pupils over others, often boys, participating in organised sports in their spare time. Keywords: assessment, ball games, equivalent grading, frame factors, physical education