Considerations in Designing a Final Performance Task
The task(s) should:
- Focus on the evaluation of overall expectations and allow students to demonstrate their comprehensive achievement of overall expectations;
- Represent individual student learning (not team/partner learning) towards the end of a course;
- Involve mostly application, since application of knowledge and skills is the predominant focus of the curriculum expectations in Health and Physical Education;
- Use an appropriate combination of methods (i.e., written, oral or performance), strategies (e.g., personal reflection, role play, performance in a game) and tools (e.g., rating scale, rubric);
- Be essential, active, feasible, equitable, open, engaging and authentic, and allow students to make connections to their lives; and
- Allow students some choice (e.g., students can choose to demonstrate their learning of healthy living concepts through a conversation or written product; students can demonstrate fundamental and transferable movement skills and strategies through games or a locomotor sequence of their choosing).
A final performance task should never involve new learning. As with all assessment tasks, students should have a clear understanding of the task and the success criteria.
Examples of Rich Final Performance Tasks
- A student-led conference (15 minutes, in the last two weeks of a course) about the student’s healthy active living profile, which would comprise a personal fitness profile, a movement skills competence profile, and a physical participation profile.
- A student-led conference about the student’s personal fitness profile. This might include a proposed personal fitness plan for the next semester, the next year or the summer.
- A team tournament in which students demonstrate their use of strategies and tactics in one or more sport/game categories (e.g., Territory, Net/Wall).
- Students perform skills of their choosing and are assessed using predetermined success criteria. (Refer to the Movement Competence Posters). Students can explain how they improved in the skills over the year. They can describe the transferable skills they acquired and how these will help them to lead a healthy, active life in the future.
- Students use technology to film their performance of fundamental transferable skills (e.g., using a movement skills circuit) at the beginning of the course and then again at the end of the course. They reflect on their performances and their improvement over the course/year.
- A written reflection or interview in which students respond to a scenario based on healthy living concepts. Students apply their knowledge to make healthy choices. They make connections to healthy living by working through a decision-making model, developing an action plan, and then completing or rewriting the ending of the scenario accordingly.
