Introduction

Every coach and physical-education teacher must constantly answer questions such as "Is this learner fit enough?", "Has her training actually improved her strength?", "Which players should make the team?" and "Is this student carrying too much body fat for good health?" If those answers rest only on a teacher's impression - a guess by eye - they are unreliable, unfair and impossible to compare across students or across time. This unit is about replacing guesswork with objective tools that produce numbers we can trust, compare and act on.

Why objective tools are needed

A judgement made "by feel" changes from day to day and from person to person; two teachers watching the same student may disagree completely. Objective testing removes this bias: it gives every learner the same task under the same conditions, produces a number, and lets that number be compared against a norm, against classmates, or against the same learner's earlier score. This is what makes assessment fair, scientific and useful for planning training. As the textbook puts it, numbers are a part of everyone's life, measurement is a way of giving meaning to numbers, and the role of measurement is to provide decision-makers with accurate, relevant information for informed choices.

The three key terms

The heart of this unit is understanding three linked ideas and how they differ:

• Test - the tool, instrument or set of tasks used to gather information about a specific trait (for example, a sit-and-reach test for flexibility).
• Measurement - the process of assigning a number or score to that trait using the test, i.e. quantifying the performance.
• Evaluation - the judgement or interpretation of that score against a standard or norm, to decide worth, progress or a grade.

These three form a single assessment cycle, defined in full in Section 6.1.

Scope of the unit

Following the CBSE handbook, the unit covers:

• Defining test, measurement and evaluation and the difference between them (Section 6.1).
• Why test, measurement and evaluation matter in sport - from the athlete's, the coach's and the training-programme's points of view (Section 6.2).
• Classification of tests in physical education - psychomotor, anthropometric, affective-domain and cognitive-domain tests (Section 6.3).
• Test administration guidelines - the pre-planning, testing-operation and post-test phases of running a test properly (Section 6.4).
• Body-composition measures - how to calculate Body Mass Index (BMI), the Waist-Hip Ratio (WHR) and the 3-site Skinfold (Section 6.5).

Two further topics named in the chapter's Learning Outcomes are also studied: the three somatotypes - Endomorphy, Mesomorphy and Ectomorphy - and their use in sport (Section 6.6), and the use of BMI in the measurement of health-related fitness (Section 6.7).