Design and validation of a test battery on physical abilities at school

Abstract

In Physical Education, initiation and sports training, it is essential to deal with physical capacities (PC) or physical-motor abilities, which are involved in achieving motor skills and improving other human abilities (Castañer & Camerino). Test batteries have been developed around the world to assess PC, including the Eurofit, ALPHA Fitness and Grami 2. In Colombia, there are several standardized physical fitness tests, but their use in schools is limited by the space required to conduct them. Therefore, it is necessary to develop and validate a battery of physical fitness tests for children between 8 and 12 years of age, adapted to the school context. For this purpose, a quantitative, nonexperimental and descriptive study was designed. For the validation of the battery, the logical validity procedures proposed by Safrit were taken into account: content validity (CVR), intra-rater reliability (T-RT) and inter-rater reliability. Finally, a PC battery was proposed that included the following tests: speed/agility (10 x 5 m test), lower body strength (long jump), upper body strength (2 k medicine ball throw), anaerobic endurance (600 m), and flexibility (sitting and reaching). The battery had a very high content validity (CVR=0.93) and the intra-subject (n=42) and inter-subject reliability values were very positive (CCI>0.90).  The scales proposed in the test, resulting from the analysis of more than one thousand children in the Aburra Valley, indicated that there are differences according to sex and age (p<0.05), but not according to sports practice (p>0.05). A didactic unit is proposed to address the PCs and an automated macro-unit to record and evaluate the information from the PCs.