Relationship between blogs and high stakes examinations in pre-service teacher understanding of the teaching games for understanding approach to physical education

Background: Research has shown that pre-service teachers have difficulty comprehending and implementing the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) model if they do not have a deep understanding of the theory and practices underpinning it. Purpose: This study examined the relationship between blogging and examinations when assessing TGfU knowledge to ascertain whether difficulties in understanding TGfU could be detected prior to a summative assessment. Methods: Participants were 26 pre-service teachers enrolled in a physical education teaching degree. The study involved assessing understanding of TGfU through weekly blogs and a high stakes examination. Pearson correlations were conducted with weekly blog grades as the independent variables and with high-stakes examination grades as the dependent. Results and Discussion: The subject coordinator’s grading of the blogs could highly predict the exam grade (r = 0.59) but this was not the case for the casual marker (r= - 0.05). The correlation between the casual marker and subject coordinator on the exam was moderate (r= 0.40). The results of the correlation suggest that there are relationships between the levels of student achievement on both the blogs and an exam. Thus we learned that there are similarities in assessment outcomes from these findings.