Skill and fitness tests alone cannot fully capture an athlete's ability — factors like anthropometric build, motivation, and concentration also affect performance. This is why Physical Education and Sports classifies tests by their nature and purpose into four broad categories: Psychomotor Tests, Anthropometric Tests, Affective Domain (emotional) Tests, and Cognitive Domain Tests — together giving a comprehensive assessment of an athlete or participant.
Psychomotor Tests assess a participant's ability to perceive instructions and perform a motor response, requiring the subject to actually perform a physical activity to their best ability and neuromuscular coordination — a sit-ups test is the chapter's own running example. This broad category is further split into four sub-types: Health-Related Fitness Tests (measuring components that need only physical presence, without any effort from the subject — e.g. BMI, somatotype, resting heart rate, lung capacity); Physical Fitness Tests (assessing the ability to perform moderate-to-vigorous activity and the reserve capacity to handle emergencies); Motor Fitness Tests (physical fitness components plus coordination abilities like hand-eye coordination, balance and agility); and Sports Skill Tests (scientifically designed, sport-specific tests with standard norms, evaluating a participant's execution of that sport's own skills).
Anthropometric Tests are the science of assessing the human body's surface measurements — height, weight, girth, width and somatotype — because different sports genuinely need different body builds, and these measurements help judge an athlete's fit for a particular sport. The chapter groups anthropometric variables into three sets: Body Measurements (body weight, stature, waist-hip ratio, BMI), Skeletal Girth/Diameters (shoulder, abdominal, hip, elbow, wrist, knee and ankle widths), and Circumferences (chest, upper-arm, fore-arm, thigh and calf).
A separate but related category, Physical Tests, measures only the body's physical presence without requiring any effort from the subject — height, weight, circumference, diameter, skinfolds, blood tests and X-rays are all examples. This is the key distinction from Psychomotor Tests: a Physical Test needs a tester and a passive subject, while a Psychomotor Test needs the subject to actively perceive an instruction and perform a motor task.
Affective Domain Tests cover the socio-psychological area — human feelings and relationship behaviour — measured through pen-and-paper tests, interviews, or projective methods; Social Behaviour Tests, Personality Tests, and tests of stress or emotional aspects fall under this category, and are constructed scientifically by experts. Cognitive Domain Tests, meanwhile, assess mental performance and achievement — knowledge, attention span, concentration, intelligence and creativity. Cognitive testing is often under-emphasised in PE and sport compared to academic subjects, but the chapter stresses it is essential: a coach must understand the cognitive demands of a sport to select and administer the right cognitive tests, and to compare scores meaningfully against standards.