Att tävla för betyg : gymnasieelevers bild av ämnet idrott och hälsa genom bedömningspraktiken

Sammanfattning: The aim is to study and reach an understanding of how upper secondary school students perceive the subject of physical education and health through the assessment practice they experience. Part of the interest concerns the content of the assessment practice and the picture of the subject emerging from this. Another part is to study what students perceive to form the basis of the actual assessment. A third field of interest is directed towards the assessment practice at large and the ways in which students perceive how far this gives them equal opportunities of showing their knowledge and skills.Focus group interviews were carried out inspired by different vignettes, based on various dilemmas identified through earlier research. Four upper secondary schools from southern Sweden are represented, with 38 interviewed students. To further understand and analyze student perceptions, a New Institutional perspective is applied focusing on normative, regulative and cultural conditions1 (Scott 2008). The regulative and normative conditions are understood on the basis of different policy documents, and the cultural conditions are interpreted through previous research in the field.It can be established that institutionalized club sport receives priority both before school policy documents and the less institutionalized health field. Some normative elements are perceived to be important, especially those linked to club sport, like cooperation, consideration, understanding and fair play, while other normative and regulative requirements are neglected or not mentioned at all, like outdoor education. The interpretation may be that above all the culturally based requirements in the form of sport affect students’ perception of the subject of physical education and health.The interviewed students perceive physical education and health as an unfair subject. There are those students who have learned to perform ”correctly” according to sport norms, while at the same time there are those who do not have these skills, and none of the students perceive that they master the sport norms correctly.