>The use of whole-class physical fitness testing to assess who is the fastest or strongest is strongly discouraged.
>The new guidance says these types of activities are demotivating for students whose physical fitness levels are low.
What’s next, no grading of exams because if you fail it’s demotivating?
Maybe they could educate kids that everyone has strengths and weaknesses?
Their reasoning of removing it because it demotivates weaker students seems a bit unnecessary. The weaker students in my class didn’t care about the beep test anyway so it hardly matters. Maybe if it was on every week, but these tests were few and far between in my school. Students need to learn how to deal with a disappointment or victory, and competition should be encouraged, particularly in sports. Otherwise watch them go into the real world and completely fall apart once they realise their interview for their first job wasn’t good enough and they won’t get a trophy for it.
Oh FFS, we should just bubble wrap kids now I guess.
“Don’t strengthen yourself; weaken the environment”.
Weakness is not a virtue. Competition is good.
Seems in this country we like to skim around important issues to avoid hurting people’s feelings.
Maybe it should be taught that being unfit and overweight is extremely unhealthy and will shorten your life?
If we lower the standards and eliminate competition, then everyone can have a trophy..
Yay!
So similar reasoning why they changed the gradings system from ABC to H or O
Do they ever considering that these might help students to push themselves.
Clickbait title; from the article itself: “Dr O’Keeffe said it is important that testing is not discouraged at post-primary level, “that guidance was specific to primary schools, which obviously wouldn’t have trained PE specialists.”
Before people lose their minds, it’s only for primary schools.
I do think there should be an emphasis on encouraging activity even if you’re not great at the individual sports.
I am naturally not athletic and PE classes were horrible for me particularly once when I was about 9 when a teacher refused to let the class move on until I scored a basket which meant the whole class staring at me while I tried over and over again. I didn’t manage it because I physically wasn’t strong enough to throw it that high and all the shouting in the world couldn’t make me stronger.
Can this sub ever see something positive? These types of event are humiliating for weaker students and do nothing to encourage them to improve.
Didn’t read the article. Is it racist or something?
Somehow I’ve managed to get through life without ever completing or starting one of these
I agree with this
I’m a PE teacher and I hate covering these part of the syllabus because students hate it too. What I see more often than not is students forming agreements to drop out after level 6 or whatever, and then you have kids that can go easily until level 12+
It just creates more anxiety than anything. Fitness and health assessments in PE should be conducted in more educational ways than just telling students they need to do this, here’s what your score means. I would personally prefer using a classroom for 6 weeks to teach about health and fitness rather than just forcing students to do it
Life will hit that generation hard.
Surely the focus should be on improving the health and fitness of the students, and if evidence shows that at primary school level this test is demotivating the weaker students from engaging in physical activity then it shouldn’t be used at that level. The article says nothing about stopping it at secondary school level, and even goes so far as to encourage it.
I swear some people on here have a real boner for making kids suffer through mismanaged education just because they had to.
I can see both sides, we done these like once a year in our school, and I can vividly remember one of the weaker, heavier kids hiding in the bathroom crying because he was so embarrassed about how slow he was. I can understand his fear of it.
But at the same time obesity is a massive problem in Ireland and physical fitness should be encouraged more, the truth hurts unfortunately.
The state of the comments on this ffs. Not having bleep tests for kids in primary school is completely reasonable. At that age its about the kids getting excersize, there are some kids who just aren’t athletic and they never will be as well as some kids who are fat through no fault of their own and would not perform well on it. It wouldn’t be fair to further shame those kids for something they effectively can’t do anything about.
Also, when I was on school we didn’t need a bleep test to tell who was the best at certain sports we just knew. The focus at that age should be a well rounded PE session and good nutritional education and also just letting them be children.
I’m not in favour of getting rid of them but I do think it’s beyond stupid that we do **nothing** to get kids fit and then suddenly once a year (if even that? felt like less) we give them a super hard fitness test that just embarrasses 90% of the class. It’d be like if you didn’t have history class all year and then they gave you an exam at the end. Tf would that be about?
And yes, we do have PE, but fuck all time is devoted to it and it’s not directed towards fitness goals at all, so it does nothing to actually get you fit.
Interesting image our national broadcaster chose to use btw.
Good idea, the test isn’t bad but public humiliation is.
The state of the comments. The bleep test serves no purpose, it encourages kids who already do exercise and discourages the ones who really need it. It just creates an association between humiliation and exercise which stops them going in the future.
Get kids into sports they enjoy, teach them how to make food they enjoy and you will get results. We have an obesity problem, fairly obviously the bleep test didn’t do much to stop it but it sounds like a solution if you don’t think about it for more than a second.
If you want to humiliate fat kids then you are weird but stop pretending like it will make their lives better.
No one here has put forward a reason as to how a bleep test encourages activity. Trust me, the slow kids copped they were slow before the test.
I loved that test. I was the fittest person in the school and just went on and on alone. I then got fat as fuck becsuse it was new school and I made new friends who all played online games.
Headline is slightly misleading, the department are advising against bleep tests in PRIMARY schools, not all schools. Tbh I only ever took one in secondary.
There’s way better ways to motivate primary school children to become fit than the bleep test. Sport which they would enjoy would be infinitely better, and the wider the range of sports the better. We used to go swimming every week some years, in others we played basketball. Then at the end of the year we generally had some sort of sports competition, like a football tournament or hockey.
All far better, and easier to motivate kids than the beep test.
I love exercise, I go to the gym ~5 times a week, I swim, and cycling is my main mode of local transport.
Hated PE in school because we were usually thrown a football, told to make our own teams and play soccer (which I’m dire at).
I’d wager that nowadays I’m fitter than the vast majority of my year at school.
This isn’t entirely relevant to the above article, just wanted to point out that PE in Irish schools sucks.
Never liked fitness related stuff in primary school myself. Secondary school wasn’t much different. You’d do PE because it’s just there and you can’t really opt out. We’d only play soccer pretty much. Moreover, there was only one PE class a week. (I’ve since devoted myself to martial arts so I know how to take care of myself, don’t worry…)
Regarding beep tests, esse es percipi… I’m sure the fitter individuals may find them useful, but for people who don’t really care, they achieve nothing. You can’t comment about everyone as a whole because of how subjective fitness matters are.
Focusing only on beep tests and matters of physical performance in PE is tunnel visioning hard; you also have to consider nutrition at various levels, maybe anatomy, and other things for a PE curriculum to truly be educational/valuable. Beep tests could be optional.
Unless you’re active in sports or just mad into the fitness, I wouldn’t ask more of you than to know some nutrition and higher level anatomy. Beyond that, how active you want to be is your choice.
When I was young I was not the fittest or fastest. I got beaten in races and older guys were stronger and could beat me in a tackle. I started training on my own at home, went running on my own, eventually I caught up and locked in my position on the team. I was motivated by my own competitive nature to fight and get better. I was not demotivated by older or fitter or bigger kids. Yes I can see there are kids who are not into sport and not into competition, but why the fuck are we continually destroying sports and competition for kids who are sporty, who like competition, who like a challenge. Guess what, life is fucking hard and if you haven’t faced a challenge at some point in your life its going to be even fucking harder for you
According to the article the guidance is mainly for primary schools. Any untrained physical fitness provider probably shouldn’t be conducting maximal aerobic tests such as a beep test anyway, there are plenty of submaximal tests that can be administered that can be used as a teaching tool. At primary school age, the type of PE activities that the teacher should be concentrating on is play, leisure and recreation, and fundamental movement skills. Testing physical fitness components, especially cardiovascular endurance, should be left until secondary school age and with trained professionals who can spot any safety concerns.
I was never the fittest person in my school, but I always felt motivated to work harder by my score on the beep tests, and looked forward to seeing who could last the longest. It was sort of fun, and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of healthy competition.
>The use of whole-class physical fitness testing to assess who is the fastest or strongest is strongly discouraged.
Ah yes because someone finding out that they’re slow is too harmful.
Guess we should eradicate all sports then because people wont like being inferior at them.
“It’s demotivating for students who’s fitness levels are low” so I stead of embarrassing them well just pay for their health care the rest of their lives “another big mac billy?”
Run the legs off the fat lil buggers
I was severely asthmatic as a child, but I grew up feeling useless and lazy because I couldn’t participate.
It wasn’t until I grew up that I realised they shouldn’t have made me sit and watch everyone doing athletics and single me out. It was fucking horrible looking back. I had a medical condition, they could have assigned me some other work to do somewhere until they were doing a lighter form of exercise.
I’m not technically asthmatic anymore, but I still cannot run, lungs burn and I taste blood. I walk a good bit though 🙂
Never did me any harm!!!
We need our children to be weak, gold medals for all, no reward for the hard working.
It’s not fair to expect fat.kods to run … Give them some more Mickie Ds
When I did bad on the bleep test I started to go out more and play outside more.
Which is more important? A child finding out it needs to improve its health – or being a porky little piggy who never had its piggly wiggly feelings hurt
Sports Science student here.
Bleep tests are a test of VO2max which is basically the amount of oxygen you consume at your highest exercise intensity. There are multiple tests that take less than 10 minutes that are just as accurate and we just hold onto the bleep test because PE teachers are told to do it. If you look at research, I haven’t seen a paper from the last 15 years that use the bleep test over Queensbury step test, Wingate Bike test or other faster and less stressful methods.
PE teachers also generally aren’t taught about this kind of testing. So in my sport science programme we do 30 credits a semester of sports science, PE teachers do either one 6 credit module or two 3 credit modules of sports related coursework. Most of this is in the realm of sports psychology and skill acquisition.
39 comments
>The use of whole-class physical fitness testing to assess who is the fastest or strongest is strongly discouraged.
>The new guidance says these types of activities are demotivating for students whose physical fitness levels are low.
What’s next, no grading of exams because if you fail it’s demotivating?
Maybe they could educate kids that everyone has strengths and weaknesses?
Their reasoning of removing it because it demotivates weaker students seems a bit unnecessary. The weaker students in my class didn’t care about the beep test anyway so it hardly matters. Maybe if it was on every week, but these tests were few and far between in my school. Students need to learn how to deal with a disappointment or victory, and competition should be encouraged, particularly in sports. Otherwise watch them go into the real world and completely fall apart once they realise their interview for their first job wasn’t good enough and they won’t get a trophy for it.
Oh FFS, we should just bubble wrap kids now I guess.
“Don’t strengthen yourself; weaken the environment”.
Weakness is not a virtue. Competition is good.
Seems in this country we like to skim around important issues to avoid hurting people’s feelings.
Maybe it should be taught that being unfit and overweight is extremely unhealthy and will shorten your life?
If we lower the standards and eliminate competition, then everyone can have a trophy..
Yay!
So similar reasoning why they changed the gradings system from ABC to H or O
Do they ever considering that these might help students to push themselves.
Clickbait title; from the article itself: “Dr O’Keeffe said it is important that testing is not discouraged at post-primary level, “that guidance was specific to primary schools, which obviously wouldn’t have trained PE specialists.”
Before people lose their minds, it’s only for primary schools.
I do think there should be an emphasis on encouraging activity even if you’re not great at the individual sports.
I am naturally not athletic and PE classes were horrible for me particularly once when I was about 9 when a teacher refused to let the class move on until I scored a basket which meant the whole class staring at me while I tried over and over again. I didn’t manage it because I physically wasn’t strong enough to throw it that high and all the shouting in the world couldn’t make me stronger.
Can this sub ever see something positive? These types of event are humiliating for weaker students and do nothing to encourage them to improve.
Didn’t read the article. Is it racist or something?
Somehow I’ve managed to get through life without ever completing or starting one of these
I agree with this
I’m a PE teacher and I hate covering these part of the syllabus because students hate it too. What I see more often than not is students forming agreements to drop out after level 6 or whatever, and then you have kids that can go easily until level 12+
It just creates more anxiety than anything. Fitness and health assessments in PE should be conducted in more educational ways than just telling students they need to do this, here’s what your score means. I would personally prefer using a classroom for 6 weeks to teach about health and fitness rather than just forcing students to do it
Life will hit that generation hard.
Surely the focus should be on improving the health and fitness of the students, and if evidence shows that at primary school level this test is demotivating the weaker students from engaging in physical activity then it shouldn’t be used at that level. The article says nothing about stopping it at secondary school level, and even goes so far as to encourage it.
I swear some people on here have a real boner for making kids suffer through mismanaged education just because they had to.
I can see both sides, we done these like once a year in our school, and I can vividly remember one of the weaker, heavier kids hiding in the bathroom crying because he was so embarrassed about how slow he was. I can understand his fear of it.
But at the same time obesity is a massive problem in Ireland and physical fitness should be encouraged more, the truth hurts unfortunately.
The state of the comments on this ffs. Not having bleep tests for kids in primary school is completely reasonable. At that age its about the kids getting excersize, there are some kids who just aren’t athletic and they never will be as well as some kids who are fat through no fault of their own and would not perform well on it. It wouldn’t be fair to further shame those kids for something they effectively can’t do anything about.
Also, when I was on school we didn’t need a bleep test to tell who was the best at certain sports we just knew. The focus at that age should be a well rounded PE session and good nutritional education and also just letting them be children.
I’m not in favour of getting rid of them but I do think it’s beyond stupid that we do **nothing** to get kids fit and then suddenly once a year (if even that? felt like less) we give them a super hard fitness test that just embarrasses 90% of the class. It’d be like if you didn’t have history class all year and then they gave you an exam at the end. Tf would that be about?
And yes, we do have PE, but fuck all time is devoted to it and it’s not directed towards fitness goals at all, so it does nothing to actually get you fit.
Interesting image our national broadcaster chose to use btw.
Good idea, the test isn’t bad but public humiliation is.
The state of the comments. The bleep test serves no purpose, it encourages kids who already do exercise and discourages the ones who really need it. It just creates an association between humiliation and exercise which stops them going in the future.
Get kids into sports they enjoy, teach them how to make food they enjoy and you will get results. We have an obesity problem, fairly obviously the bleep test didn’t do much to stop it but it sounds like a solution if you don’t think about it for more than a second.
If you want to humiliate fat kids then you are weird but stop pretending like it will make their lives better.
No one here has put forward a reason as to how a bleep test encourages activity. Trust me, the slow kids copped they were slow before the test.
I loved that test. I was the fittest person in the school and just went on and on alone. I then got fat as fuck becsuse it was new school and I made new friends who all played online games.
Headline is slightly misleading, the department are advising against bleep tests in PRIMARY schools, not all schools. Tbh I only ever took one in secondary.
There’s way better ways to motivate primary school children to become fit than the bleep test. Sport which they would enjoy would be infinitely better, and the wider the range of sports the better. We used to go swimming every week some years, in others we played basketball. Then at the end of the year we generally had some sort of sports competition, like a football tournament or hockey.
All far better, and easier to motivate kids than the beep test.
I love exercise, I go to the gym ~5 times a week, I swim, and cycling is my main mode of local transport.
Hated PE in school because we were usually thrown a football, told to make our own teams and play soccer (which I’m dire at).
I’d wager that nowadays I’m fitter than the vast majority of my year at school.
This isn’t entirely relevant to the above article, just wanted to point out that PE in Irish schools sucks.
Never liked fitness related stuff in primary school myself. Secondary school wasn’t much different. You’d do PE because it’s just there and you can’t really opt out. We’d only play soccer pretty much. Moreover, there was only one PE class a week. (I’ve since devoted myself to martial arts so I know how to take care of myself, don’t worry…)
Regarding beep tests, esse es percipi… I’m sure the fitter individuals may find them useful, but for people who don’t really care, they achieve nothing. You can’t comment about everyone as a whole because of how subjective fitness matters are.
Focusing only on beep tests and matters of physical performance in PE is tunnel visioning hard; you also have to consider nutrition at various levels, maybe anatomy, and other things for a PE curriculum to truly be educational/valuable. Beep tests could be optional.
Unless you’re active in sports or just mad into the fitness, I wouldn’t ask more of you than to know some nutrition and higher level anatomy. Beyond that, how active you want to be is your choice.
When I was young I was not the fittest or fastest. I got beaten in races and older guys were stronger and could beat me in a tackle. I started training on my own at home, went running on my own, eventually I caught up and locked in my position on the team. I was motivated by my own competitive nature to fight and get better. I was not demotivated by older or fitter or bigger kids. Yes I can see there are kids who are not into sport and not into competition, but why the fuck are we continually destroying sports and competition for kids who are sporty, who like competition, who like a challenge. Guess what, life is fucking hard and if you haven’t faced a challenge at some point in your life its going to be even fucking harder for you
According to the article the guidance is mainly for primary schools. Any untrained physical fitness provider probably shouldn’t be conducting maximal aerobic tests such as a beep test anyway, there are plenty of submaximal tests that can be administered that can be used as a teaching tool. At primary school age, the type of PE activities that the teacher should be concentrating on is play, leisure and recreation, and fundamental movement skills. Testing physical fitness components, especially cardiovascular endurance, should be left until secondary school age and with trained professionals who can spot any safety concerns.
I was never the fittest person in my school, but I always felt motivated to work harder by my score on the beep tests, and looked forward to seeing who could last the longest. It was sort of fun, and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of healthy competition.
>The use of whole-class physical fitness testing to assess who is the fastest or strongest is strongly discouraged.
Ah yes because someone finding out that they’re slow is too harmful.
Guess we should eradicate all sports then because people wont like being inferior at them.
“It’s demotivating for students who’s fitness levels are low” so I stead of embarrassing them well just pay for their health care the rest of their lives “another big mac billy?”
Run the legs off the fat lil buggers
I was severely asthmatic as a child, but I grew up feeling useless and lazy because I couldn’t participate.
It wasn’t until I grew up that I realised they shouldn’t have made me sit and watch everyone doing athletics and single me out. It was fucking horrible looking back. I had a medical condition, they could have assigned me some other work to do somewhere until they were doing a lighter form of exercise.
I’m not technically asthmatic anymore, but I still cannot run, lungs burn and I taste blood. I walk a good bit though 🙂
Never did me any harm!!!
We need our children to be weak, gold medals for all, no reward for the hard working.
It’s not fair to expect fat.kods to run … Give them some more Mickie Ds
When I did bad on the bleep test I started to go out more and play outside more.
Which is more important? A child finding out it needs to improve its health – or being a porky little piggy who never had its piggly wiggly feelings hurt
Sports Science student here.
Bleep tests are a test of VO2max which is basically the amount of oxygen you consume at your highest exercise intensity. There are multiple tests that take less than 10 minutes that are just as accurate and we just hold onto the bleep test because PE teachers are told to do it. If you look at research, I haven’t seen a paper from the last 15 years that use the bleep test over Queensbury step test, Wingate Bike test or other faster and less stressful methods.
PE teachers also generally aren’t taught about this kind of testing. So in my sport science programme we do 30 credits a semester of sports science, PE teachers do either one 6 credit module or two 3 credit modules of sports related coursework. Most of this is in the realm of sports psychology and skill acquisition.