4th Grade Study Notes for Learning More about Fitness Testing
PE.4.HF.3.1: Understand why and how to complete a valid and reliable pre and post health-enhancing fitness assessment, including monitoring of the heart.
To better understand our objective above it may be helpful to know the meanings of a couple of words in the objective.
When something is said to be “Valid” it is fair and reasonable.
Also when something is “Reliable” it can be trusted and provide what is needed.
To find your pulse doctors, nurses and other medical people will typically go to one of two places:
1. A place on your neck just below your ear and jawbone.
or
2. On your wrist, just below your thumb.
Your heart rate is directly related to your pulse. Once you find your pulse. You can calculate your heart rate by counting how many times your heart beats in one minute/sixty seconds. ______________________________________________________________________________________
There are several reasons why we do fitness testing and/or why we do the tests twice a year.
Here are some of them.
It gives students a chance to set goals.
The fitness test scores help determine the fitness levels of students.
Parents and guardians can use the test scores/results to help plan fitness activities for their children.
Doing the tests twice give students a chance to see if they improved between the first and second time.
P.E. teachers can use the testing information to help design classes and units.
Remember, you do not get graded on the actual fitness testing. Also, just doing the fitness tests will not make your heart healthy, or make you faster and stronger. ______________________________________________________________________________________
As we mentioned above doing the fitness tests twice gives students a chance to set goals. There are several things to keep in mind when setting a goal, any goal. Here are some of them.
You have to know what you want to achieve. In other words you need to identify the goal.
The goal can’t be easy to reach or impossible to achieve, but it does need to be challenging. For example, if your goal is to do 18 laps in the second pacer test when you did 17 in the first test. It’s good that you want to do better, but that might be pretty easy to achieve. But if you want to increase your pacer score to 24, well you probably have a pretty good chance of doing that. You will just need to work harder.
So you know whether or not you met your goal you will have to be able to measure it. In other words if you’re challenging goal was to improve from doing 4 push-ups to doing 8, and you actually did 8 push-ups then you clearly know that you met your goal.