Assessing Learning Processes in Games and Sports: Practical Recommendations and Suggestions for Measuring Psychomotor-Related Performance in Game-Play Within the School Context

Physical education (PE) curriculums all over the world recognize the relevance of teaching games and sports throughout all school stages with the aim of helping a student to become an active participant in different typologies of sport. To support this mission, the game-based approaches (GBAs) are the teaching strategies used the most. Appropriate assessment instruments are also needed to properly support PE teachers. In this respect, the tools used for assessing these learning aims need to go beyond the measure of a skill performed outside of the game-play context, but they also have to account for the decision process adopted by a player when he/she has, for example, possession of a ball or when performing a movement without a ball. This chapter describes the theoretical models which support the tools used for the proper assessment of game-play performance as well as the main characteristics of the indexes of these tools and provides indications for their use during PE lessons.