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Assessment is a powerful message system in education, but one which has not received sufficient research and critical or theoretical attention in the field of physical education. Drawing on the physical education and health (PEH) assessment experiences of 16-year-old students in the Swedish education system, the focus in this paper is on what students learn about the purpose, practice and possible consequences of summative assessment. By studying their beliefs about grades and perceptions of the criteria for receiving a high grade in PEH, the aim is to analyse what values students comprehend and learn as important in the subject. Our conclusion is that the students learn, through and as a consequence or outcome of assessment, the valued characteristics and behaviours necessary for acquiring the institutional cultural capital of high grades, as well as information about the value of their capacities and their relative value within the field of PEH.

Based on a socio-cultural perspective on learning, the aim of this article is to examine how aims and learning goals are communicated in physical education (PE) practice. A special focus is on scrutinising how teaching practices are framed in terms of whether and how the aims and learning goals are made explicit or not to students. The aim is also to relate these kinds of communications to different movement cultures. The result shows that many of the students taking part in the study do not understand what they are supposed to learn in PE. However, if the goals are well articulated by teachers, the students are more likely to both understand and be aware of the learning outcomes and what to learn in PE. The opposite is also true. If the goals and objectives are not clarified, students find it difficult to state the learning objectives and know what they are supposed to learn.