Statewide Physical Fitness Testing: A BIG Waist or a BIG Waste?

Abstract

Statewide physical fitness testing is gaining popularity in the United States because of increased childhood obesity levels, the relations between physical fitness and academic performance, and the hypothesized relations between adult characteristics and childhood physical activity, physical fitness, and health behaviors. Large-scale physical fitness testing can be fraught with problems unless properly planned and conducted. Legislators, administrators, teachers, and parents should consider the following 10 essential issues when conducting large-scale physical fitness testing purpose of testing, proper planning, training, quality of the data, reporting support, costs, interpretation, programmatic matters, and policies and politics.

International variability in 20 m shuttle run performance in children and youth: who are the fittest from a 50-country comparison? A systematic literature review with pooling of aggregate results

“…Taken together, these findings indicate that the population status of CRE in children and youth may help predict future non-communicable disease burden. As a result, there have been recent calls in North America,13 14 South America,15 Europe16 and Oceania17 to monitor CRE in children and youth through continuous surveillance efforts.…”

First normative reference of standing long jump indicates gender difference in lower muscular strength of Macedonian school children

“…In the recent years, there were many scientific works and researches published, particularly by USA authors, elaborating certain problems and issues connected with follow-up of the fitness within the teaching of physical education [24][25][26][27]. One of the most important issues being discussed in these researches is the issue of establishing normative reference that would allow proper assessment, interpretation and comparison of the level of physical fitness of school children in terms of the age, gender, region etc.…”

Measurement agreement of FITNESSGRAM aerobic capacity and body composition standards

“…However, according to the National Association for Sports and Physical Education (NASPE), "The primary goal of assessment should be seen as the enhancement of learning, rather than simply the documenting of learning" (NASPE, 1995). There has been considerable debate about whether school-based fitness testing is a good use of time in the curriculum (Mahar and Rowe, 2008;Silverman, Keating and Phillips, 2008;Welk, 2008;Morrow and Ede, 2009). Some of the main uses of fitness testing include facilitating in fitness education, providing feedback and allowing personal tracking (Welk and Meredith, 2008).…”