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Movement Assessment: Multiple Choice or Essay Question? By Harold Smith, Alpine Board of Examiners, Attitash, NH
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side from the dreaded Pop Quiz first thing on Monday morning in Chemistry class, few test situations inspire more unease in students than being given a blank piece of paper and asked an essay question. Most students would much rather see a multiple-choice exam. The attraction is that a multiple-choice test doesn’t require you to actually create a correct answer. The test supplies the answer! All you need to do is choose which one it is. Moreover, there are usually some obvious choices to eliminate, so even on that Monday morning, with precious little academic work having been done over the weekend, the exam comes down to some decent odds of maybe lucking into a few right answers. In our certification exams, specifically the Movement Assessment portion of the Level II and III Teaching Exams, many candidates seem to see it as an essay question, and an intimidating one at that. I would like to suggest, instead, that Movement Assessment (M.A.) might better be viewed as a less intimidating multiple-choice exam. It’s not that assessing and interpreting complex movements of skiers on uneven and changing surfaces can be reduced to a limited set of ‘pat’ answers. But at least in the first, initial stages of looking at moving skiers, there are indeed a limited set of questions to ask. First, no matter what movements we make, no matter the surface we’re on, the most important question is what the ski is doing on (or in!) the snow. And here’s the multiple-choice part: a ski can only do a few different things! A ski can track along its length (as with a straight run on a flat ski, or maybe railroad track turns with edged skis); a ski can slip sideways; part of or all of the ski can lift off the snow; and finally the ski can bend in an arc (de-camber). So a first question in M.A. can
be one of ski performance: Do the skis track, slip, lift and/or bend? (Geek alert: yes, a ski can also exhibit longitudinal torsional elasticity, but that’s really hard to see in real time. Multiple discipline alert: however, it’s really, really important to snowboard performance!). Next, it’s helpful to treat the skier’s path as a second, multiple-choice question: Where in the turn are things happening? We can identify the turn (top of turn); the shaping phase (middle or belly of turn) and the finish (bottom of turn). And then there is the transition between the finish phase of one arc and the initiation of the next arc. So at this point, through two straightforward multiple-choice questions, we’ve identified the ski performance at the various phases of the turn. We are then left with the question of what the skier’s body is doing to cause these ski/snow interactions. Admittedly, the biomechanics of skiing , this cause-and-effect of body movements and their effect on the skis, is indeed complex. But again, a very few multiple-choice questions can go a long ways towards unraveling things. We can start with one of our five skiing fundamentals, namely that there should be separation/independence between the lower body (legs) and upper body (torso, including the pelvis). So the next question we can ask is whether the observed ski actions (track, slip, lift or bend) are caused by the legs or the torso: Are the legs rotating within the hip socket, or is the torso twisting? Are the joints in the legs angulating to edge the ski, or is the torso tipping to the side? And with respect to the joints in the leg, there are only three of them, so that’s another simple multiplechoice question: What joints are working and to what degree? For example, is the knee joint doing most of the flexing and bending? Might there be an observed
limitation is the range of motion of one joint? Or are the ankle, knee and hip joints working together? More in-depth M.A. can include questions involving the things actually attached to the torso, namely the shoulders and arms, and the head and neck. Or we might ask questions related to the role of the spine and how it interacts with the pelvis. But again, these can be looked at as reasonable and approachable multiplechoice questions, instead of a single all-encompassing and open-ended essay question. So here are the multiple-choice questions I find useful in beginning my assessment: 1) Ski Performance - How does the ski interact with the snow? Do the skis track, slip, lift and/or bend. 2) Turn Phase – Where in the turn does this happen? Does this occur in the initiation, shaping, finish or transition? 3) Skier Movements – Which body parts/joints cause this? Are the legs acting under a stable torso? Are the ankle, knee and hip joints bending, unbending or rotating in consort with one another? What might be the role of the spine, the shoulders and arms, and the head and neck? We should note, however, that while these questions do get us through the observation phase of M.A. and represent a start on the evaluation phase, judging and evaluating movements truly is an art. And creating an effective, student-centered prescription to modify movements for a given individual is high art. To the best teachers among us, this high art is the ultimate essay question, one that is open-ended and evaluative, is sometimes subtle and often devilishly complicated, and one which can demand great creativity from a coach. So, as a way of summarizing this printed essay, how about one final multiple-choice question: Is Movement Assessment A) a multiple-choice test, or B) an essay exam? Trick question! The correct answer is C) Both. <<
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