A clash of fundamental assumptions: Can/should we measure physical literacy?

The special issue of the Journal of Teaching in Physical Education (JTPE) 1 on physical literacy (PL) has provided much needed information about measuring and assessing student learning in terms of the well-defined and yet abstract concept.Multiple authors have elaborated from diverse educational and psychometric perspectives on the development of the construct, the measurement model, and the assessment of the construct.In this attempt, many issues associated with the conception of PL were clarified and insightful information and arguments were brought forward.In this regard, the special issue has moved our understanding of the concept one step further.More importantly, it points to a possibility to actualize the teaching of the concept in physical education (PE).A core collection of articles is focused on specific issues related to assessing PL in PE.Cairney et al. 2 presented a case of validating a PL construct with a sample of 5th-and 7th-grade students in Canada.Shortt et al. 3 and Keegan et al. 4 conducted separate studies in the United States and Australia on defining PL domain specificity and content representativeness using Delphi or modified Delphi methods.Barnett et al. 5 developed and articulated the guidelines for selecting measures from existing assessments in PE to assess PL.Other articles also touched on PL assessment to imply that PL should and can be assessed in PE.Although the effort is plausible, establishing valid PL assessment tools and systems may be a much more complicated endeavor than what is being attempted and presented in the special issue.The endeavor requires careful considerations that seem absent in the validation studies.The purpose of this commentary is to raise a few important concerns about the current practices of creating PL assessment, and challenge the use of the traditional measurement theory in developing assessment tools to measure PL as manifested in the special issue.I believe that an in-depth discussion will help us to clarify these concerns about PL measurement and inform future efforts in developing assessment systems for this very difficult-to-measure concept.