Fun, fairness, and challenge could inform the development of three standards with students that could be used to structure their PE sessions. Ask them how do you measure fun? How do you measure fairness: How do you measrue challenge? If they participate in the development of standards, they will be more interested in using them as a guide to improvement - have more fun, play more fairly, ramp up the challenge.

If they are focused on improving something - like catching - then they should come with the intention of working on that. PE class is not recess. They should have fun, but if they are not focused on anything other than having fun, then they will not be able to improve in any substantive way and it will be impossible to provide any coaching that might lead to that.

Similar problems in language and writing instruction. Ss want to show off their skills and to experiment and do things their own way. That is fine - accomplished writers do this all the time Shakespeare made up hundreds of words. We are not all Shakespeare though - we can make up words in specific contexts, but in writing instruction, the goal is to master common forms and structures before moving on to display personal creativity, yet, even within common forms, there is room for personal creativity. When assessing in this way, it is important to focus on the standards and what those mean in terms of performance - otherwise, be become bogged down and unable to provide clear, consistent, and actional feedback that can lead to improvement in performance.

All performances are complex, and when coaching, it is impossible to attend to every minute detail. Formative assessment - active coaching - is individualized feedback to improve overall performance. Evaluating that performance, is to focus on the performance as a whole.

I think a performance focus in important in a lot of fields because, ultimately, education is about what folks are able to do. Knowledge of things is not useful until it is applied to some problem or task. A performance focus could improve assessment across the board and shift teachers away from merely testing "content".

How to create a rubric for performance assessment?