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This article addresses ways in which fitness tests can be used positively in physical education. We take the position throughout the article that fitness tests should be used as formative evaluation to further educational goals. We begin by discussing the different ways in which adults and children use fitness tests. The next section, the heart of the article, provides guidelines for incorporating fitness testing into the physical education curriculum and maintains that: (a) fitness testing should be implemented as an integral part of fitness instruction; (b) fitness testing results should be used to assess fitness instruction and student learning; and (c) the expectation should be that all children have the potential to meet basic health-related fitness standards. The final section focuses on the related issues of students' perceptions of fitness tests and ways to assist teachers in productively implementing fitness tests.

This study was designed to investigate the status of teachers' use of fitness tests in school-based physical education programs. Full-time physical education teachers (N = 325) in 10 states participated. A questionnaire was developed specifically for this study to collect data. Various methods were utilized to lend evidence for the reliability and validity of the items on the questionnaire. Means and standard deviations of continuous variables and Likert-type variables were computed. Frequencies of category variables were calculated and percentages of the frequencies were reported. The results were: (a) most of the teachers used fitness tests with the majority using nationally available fitness tests (among those who implemented the nationally available fitness tests, most utilized the norm-referenced test [i.e., President's Challenge, 1998] and not criterion-referenced tests [i.e., the Fitnessgram, or YMCA Youth Fitness Test Program]), (b) teachers in general implemented different approaches to prepare students for fitness testing and most teachers informed students verbally about the tests in advance, (c) helping students gain awards was the least important purpose for teachers to use fitness tests, and (d) fitness testing was not strongly associated with teachers' fitness/physical activity instruction. The data from the study suggested that fitness testing is merely an isolated part of physical education programs. (Contains 8 tables.)

Although replication is important to the validity of a study and is endorsed by more and more scholars, few researchers in kinesiology attend to this issue. Some researchers may believe that statistical significance and effect size are the most important statistical issues in their research and thereby may have ignored the importance of result replication. Both significance testing and effect size, however, rarely inform researchers about the likelihood that results will be replicated in different samples drawn from the same population. The primary purpose of this tutorial is to provide readers with information regarding result replicability evaluation, focusing on double cross-validation approaches. This tutorial can also serve as a practical guide for conducting replicability analyses using double cross-validation methods. (Contains 5 tables.)