Measurement and Evaluation in Human Performance, 3rd Edition
Publishers:
ISBN-10: 0736065032
ISBN-13: 9780736065030
Description: Copyright 2005, 416 pages
Authors: James R. Morrow, Jr., Allen W. Jackson, James G. Disch, and Dale P. Mood

Reviewer: Ted Scheck

I’ll be 46 in a few months, and a few things that scared me in college still scare me now. Hockey masks with dents in them, hornets and other insects swirling around hives, all things which are very scary. However, one of my relatively new fears is statistics, everything from mean, median, & mode. I grew up wanting to be a Gym Teacher, and being math-phobic, became one, but now I’m a Wellness/PE teacher, and if I don’t change with my profession, my profession will leave me in the dust. Over time, statistics are becoming more important in Wellness/Physical Education. It is easy to see how solid statistics validate P.E. programs. Well-kept records of fitness scores – Indianapolis Public Schools uses the FitnessGram, and it’s easy to use – can make or break a program. Records of student performance – be it an increase in obesity or an increase in aerobic endurance – are vital for P.E. Teachers. Changes in behavior are more reliable if reliability measures are included. Change in P.E. programs can occur from a thorough study of carefully-recorded and kept records. Data can justify the continued existence of fitness programs.

I was comforted in reading the Introduction by a very friendly metaphor, or perhaps it’s an idiom. There was no math in it, so I liked it fine. It goes something like this, and I’m paraphrasing: “The attitude one brings to the table affects what one perceives on that table.” Meaning, to me, that since I had to take Tests and Measurements twice in college (got a low grade the first time) I’ve had a rather negative perception towards stats. This book is helping to change that perception. The introduction was also helpful in setting a foundation for the rest of the book. They reviewed the terms we’ve all heard: Evaluation, formative and summative. Bloom’s taxonomy, with a nifty little table covering the Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor Domains, in my opinion, the Holy Trinity of Physical Education, Wellness, Fitness, and Health, the wellspring from which all quality P.E./Wellness programs flow from.

The fantastic extras that this book contains are numerous. Their website (www.HumanKinetics.com/MeasurementAndEvaluationInHumanPerformance/SG/getstart_01.cfm) has an online study guide. It’s divided into seven categories: Outline, Selected Answers to Mastery Items, Homework Problems, Selected Homework Answers, Quizzes, Related Links, and Data Matrixes. I went through everything and printed them off and I have this in a little binder. When I face my fears of math and statistics, I’ll be armed with my study guide and my sharpened pencils and a huge eraser and lots of paper and I’ll experiment, slowly, with some of these stats. Or I will be able to use the conveniently-placed SPSS, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. SPSS is a numbers cruncher the student can access to crunch numbers without expensive calculators or endless hours of broken lead and crumpled sheets of wadded-up paper. You can send the data to Microsoft Excel and boom! There’s your data, all tidied up. The book takes you slowly and carefully through the entire process. I wouldn’t say it’s easy (nothing worthwhile ever is, my dad used to say) but it is very convenient, and incredibly useful.

Chapter three gets into the deep and convoluted world of advanced statistics and math. Here we get into the Alien world of Mean, Median, Mode, skewness, areas under curves, and with your handy-dandy SPSS program, all you have to do is enter data in accurately and you’ll get results. The chapters are thorough and go deep into the statistical world. Chapter 4 goes into correlation and prediction, with measurement error, prediction, and calculating r. Inferential statistics are covered in Chapter 5, with the groundwork being laid with Hypothesis Testing and a thorough explanation of the Scientific Method.

Part II begins with the cornerstones of data: Reliability and Validity, in regards to Grading. Chapter 6 is Norm-Referenced Measurement. Everything in the book can be traced to the concepts of consistently repeatability in measurement and the degree of truthfulness of a test score. I’m in my 2nd class of a 4-class certification on Gifted Education at Ball State University, and we’ve been through the importance of reliability and validity in regards to the types of tests used to measure giftedness, and the emphasis is just as important there as it is here in the book. I gained an appreciation of statistics that I missed in college.

There are many different types of reliability, and like types of bagels, you can have your plain sliced warmed-up bagel, or you can have a pumpernickel bagel, or (my favorite) an everything bagel. I have to arm myself with numerous toothpicks after the everything bagel, but oh, how delicious. There are tons of graphs and tables in these chapters, all pertaining to human performance, but quite a few pertaining to behavior. Again, the SPSS program keeps you right up there with the concepts, going hand-in-hand the whole way through the chapters.

Chapter 7 covers Criterion-Referenced Measurement, and behavioral objectives. Any Wellness/P.E. Teacher will be well-read in this concept, and ahead of the game by writing behavioral objectives and expectations down well before accepting that first teaching job. Education has advanced in the 24 years since I graduated from college, and if this text is any indication of the level of preparedness, then the future of P.E. is in good hands.

Chapter 8 was very familiar, and read almost like one of my gifted education texts, with Alternative Assessment. Portfolios, role playing, interviews, event tasks, individual/group tasks, open-ended questions, logs/journals, all things I’ve tried this year or I’ll try next year in my study of gifted and talented/high ability education. They were all in this chapter! I was kind of surprised, it seemed an odd chapter surrounded by all those Greek symbols and Alien heads. The rubrics were fascinating. I’ve always enjoyed rubrics, ever since I learned that the clown poster I drew with magic markers, with the nose as the bull’s-eye, was indeed a rubric for the skill of overhand throwing. The most amazing rubric I’ve ever seen, check it out on p. 141, was “Responsibility Scoring Rubric for Elementary P.E.” and I copied it onto Microsoft Word and gave all the teachers with whom I work with a copy, and I posed one in my Gym. Amazing. I’d never seen anything like it before.

Chapter 9 was Grading (Summative Evaluation) and Chapter 10 (Part III) was how to apply measurement and evaluation into your curriculum. Very detailed, especially the parts of ‘what to and what NOT to measure’. All types of test questions are probed in minute detail, from the classic True/False to Matching to Multiple Choice to Essay. My favorite chapter was 11, Physical Fitness. I don’t have enough room to explain how cool this chapter was. I’ve always thought that fitness was the backbone of Physical Education, and the book confirmed that same belief. Adult fitness was covered in 11 with a portion of the chapter devoted to fitness in older adult populations, due to be very relevant as our country ages and health care keeps our elderly healthy for much longer than they’ve ever been. Fitness in children is covered in 12. Plenty of helpful, informative tables throughout. All aspects of health-related and skill-related physical fitness were covered in fantastic detail. Chapter 13 covered the assessment of sport skills/motor abilities, and developing psychomotor tests. Sport psychology is dabbed a little bit in the next chapter, with caution going out to the concept of who is qualified to administer these tests. We get deep into the feelings of taking a test and how behaviors are affected while taking tests. A thorough glossary is at the very end of the book.

Overall, one of the most amazingly thorough books I’ve ever encountered; actually about three books in one: a text on Tests and Measurements, Physical Fitness, and Amazing Extras, with the SPSS, online study guide, and extras sprinkled throughout. I highly recommend it.