California Fitness Test, Part 1

What is the Fitnessgram Test

Every year, each public school in California administers the Fitnessgram tests to all children in fifth, seventh and ninth grades. The Cooper Institute of Dallas, Texas, developed this test in 1982 to evaluate students’ health and physical fitness. These tests provide information to the California State Board of Education so it can develop political strategies to improve children health. During the last several years of implementation, the published data has shown that the health of our youth population is not improving and that they are becoming more sedentary.

The Fitnessgram is a set of tests designed to evaluate the health and fitness levels of students and to assist them in establishing lifetime habits of regular physical activity. The Fitnessgram is designed to assess six key fitness areas that represent three broad components of fitness: (1) aerobic capacity, (2) body composition, and (3) muscle strength, endurance, and flexibility. This third component is divided into four areas: abdominal strength and endurance, trunk extensors strength and flexibility, upper body strength and endurance, and flexibility.

Fitnessgram Methodological Considerations

During the implementation of the California Fitness Test, several methodological inconsistencies and errors have occurred that prevent this valuable program from achieving the proposed goals of evaluating the health of the fifth-, seventh- and ninth-grade students in California’s public schools. In the next series of articles, I focus on the interpretation of data for the aerobic capacity test, particularly for girls.

 The following summarizes the main considerations that frame my analysis:

Test protocols.

The utilized field-tests allow only for an approximation of the intended capacity evaluation. With the protocols in use, it might be possible to identify subjects at the extreme of the evaluated population, but otherwise it is difficult to use the obtained data for criterion assessment, because this might place some students in an inappropriate position for the initial purpose of their health evaluation.

Determination of maximum effort.

One of the most important requirements of the aerobic tests is that the participants finish the evaluation having exerted the maximum possible effort. If that does not happen, the test will not be measuring “maximum individual VO2 consumption.” During the analysis of the California Fitness Test, did the children finish the test performing at their maximum capacity? During the laboratory evaluation, when the test is performed with one participant at the time and under extreme protocol considerations, the main concern is how to determine whether the maximum effort is accomplished.

Exercise tests with children and adolescents are normally terminated when the participant, despite strong verbal encouragement from the experimenters, is unable or unwilling to continue. The problem now is to decide whether the participant has delivered a maximum effort. Vital factors in making that decision include habituation to the laboratory environment; subjective criteria of intense effort such as facial flushing, sweating, hyperpnoea, and unsteady gate; and the pediatric exercise testing experience of the experimenter. Other available supportive physiological indicators include heart rate, respiratory exchange ratio, and blood lactate. Determining whether the achievement of maximum effort has been attained is not an easy task. It has been of concern to researchers and has not been completely solved.

If children in each year finished the test at different intensities, how are we going to compare the data, and moreover how will we decide if their performance improved or decreased? The standardization and criteria used for test termination is decisive at the time of obtaining a VO2 max consumption.

Data collection.

The administration of the tests lacks uniformity. The criteria for test implementation, data recording, and presentation also lack uniformity. Teachers and other test providers are not trained consistently in any of the mentioned areas.

Data processing.

The assigning each participant to a “belong” or “not belong” health category (healthy fitness zone or not) is a simplification that does not allow for the proper “individual health evaluation.” This type of processing might be useful for a massive epidemiological analysis. However, at the individual level, those procedures generate a discrimination that discourages youth from participating in physical activity, which is the opposite of what this program seeks to achieve.

It is the expressed desire of the Fitnessgram to help the California’s youth population enhance its health. The main goal of the California Fitness Tests is to understand the uniqueness of the individual participants, their actual current capacity, and their potential to achieve further states of physical and health condition. But ultimately, the simplification of the obtained data and its analysis has jeopardized the actual benefit of the program.

With all the previous considerations in mind, I make the exceptional assumption that every previously described step is valid and with no methodological errors.

Even though five tests have been used for the same purpose of evaluating physical capacity with the same sources of problems, my focus is only on the “aerobic capacity tests.” With this assumption made, I will provide a different reading and interpretation of the data, taking into consideration the current published scientific data in the area of youth growth and maturation. By analyzing the data from a different perspective, I consider it is possible to arrive at a more optimistic reading of current health trends for California’s youth.