PhysAssist™ Slashes The Time

You Spend On Administrative Tasks

FREQUENT QUESTIONS

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF PhysAssist™

ReFind Solutions, LLC’s PhysAssist™ Software

PhysAssist™ is a software program designed especially to assist physical education teachers and students of all grade levels.

PhysAssist™ will allow the creation of an individual file for each student in each of the Sections and Sub-Sections of the program. Student files can be imported from existing school student databases alleviating the need to manually create each record.

In creating the student files, PhysAssist™ allows the flexibility to import and store as much or as little of the students’ demographic information as desired. When it comes time review data that has been entered into the program, in addition to sorting and compiling the data by the actual content entered into the PhysAssist™ software, records may also be grouped by one, or a combination of several factors that make up the students’ demographic information entered when the students’ files were created. This flexibility in organization will produce very nicely organized reports when assessing the progress of a particular student or group of students.  

PhysAssist™ is comprised of three main Sections—an Administrative Section, an Education Section, and a Miscellaneous Section. These three Sections and their component Sub-Sections are briefly described below.

The Administrative Section

This Section contains four Sub-Sections, each of which stores and organizes a specific data group of information. The four Sub-Sections are titled Attendance, Grading, FitnessFile™, and Standards.

Attendance

The Attendance Section allows teachers to automate their attendance record keeping and corresponding scoring based on the students’ attendance. When taking attendance, one of sixteen different codes can be entered daily based on the individual student’s attendance.

For example, such codes may indicate an excused absence, unexcused absence, excused tardy, unexcused tardy, medical excuse, no dress, etc. Once codes are entered, a point value is assigned to the particular code. An absence may be worth 0 points, while an unexcused tardy may be worth 3 points.

As days pass, PhysAssist™ will automatically display a running total of the points accumulated based on the codes entered for each student, and at the end of a given accounting period, the overall cumulative points will be calculated.

Grading

The Grading Section allows teachers to keep track of all students’ assignments and tests and the grades awarded for each.

Each assignment or test is assigned a grade item number. Each grade item number can be assigned a different scoring parameter. Once the scoring parameter is set, the students’ assignment or test scores can be entered, and PhysAssist™ will then automatically calculate a grade value based on whatever system the teacher employs.

FitnessFile

FitnessFile provides an area for teachers to track individual notes on individual students regarding any matter whatsoever. Once entered, notes may be located, sorted, and compiled by any note category that the individual teacher decides.

Standards

This Sub-Section of the Administrative Section of PhysAssist™ contains specific standardized tests to gauge the knowledge and fitness performance levels of each individual student, or for a specific group of students. Standardized tests are designed for each of three grade levels—elementary, middle school, and high school.

For each grade level, there is a knowledge based test and a physical fitness performance test. As the knowledge-based tests are completed by the students, the individual student’s test can be exported to a scoring file that will automatically scan the test and score it.

As fitness performance tests are taken by the students, the raw scores entered for each test are then assigned a mean z score, which is then compared and assigned a composite percentile value to notify the teacher just where that student is in his or her physical development compared to other students at his or her age level.

The Education Section

The Education Section of PhysAssist™ also contains four Sub-Sections—the FitnessTrain™ Sub-Section, the SportText, the SporTEST, and the SkillDrills Sub-Sections.

FitnessTrain™

FitnessTrain™ provides a template that allows the design of strength building programs for those interested in a general fitness plan or a sport specific plan. In addition to the strength building templates, there are also templates for designing speed development, flexibility development, and endurance building programs.

Also, this FitnessTrain™ Section of PhysAssist™ contains a Training Schedule design Sub-Section, a Goal Setting Sub-Section, and a Circuit Training Sub-Section.

For those not familiar with how to perform certain strength, speed, or flexibility exercises, photos or videos that show the proper technique to use in the performance of the exercises may be added.

SporTEXT

This SporTEXT Section of PhysAssist™ allows teachers to enter information about the various sport units that can be taught at the various grade levels. Teachers may customize their individual teaching points for each unit that they teach in a physical education class. From the information supplied or entered by the teachers, test questions can then be developed for use in the SporTEST Section of PhysAssist™.

SporTEST

The SporTEST Section enables teachers to design their own tests. Tests can be developed on any subject matter, at any time, and they can be stored for use in years to come.

When the students take the tests, they can then be exported to a scoring component that will automatically score the test based on the answer key designed by the teacher. The students’ scores can then be entered in the PhysAssist™ Grading Section, which will automatically calculate the tests’ grades based on the grading parameters decided upon by the teacher.

SkillDrills

The SkillDrills area allows teachers to develop, store, and organize various education materials relating to various skills taught for each physical education unit. For example, in a baseball or softball unit, students may be taught batting skills, fielding skills, and running skills.

In this Sub-Section, these skills can be described in text form for the students to review, or, if the teacher has diagrams or digital photo or video files presenting a given drill, they may be entered into the program as well.

The Miscellaneous Section

This Section, too, is divided into four Sub-Sections—Fitness Tests, SporTEST Master Grader, Master Import, and the PhysAssist™ Tutorial.

Fitness Tests

The Fitness Tests area within this Section provides two fitness tests in addition to the Standards Fitness Test.  One of them is the complete Presidential Fitness Test. As students of all ages and grade levels perform the exercises and enter their scores, the program will automatically score it based on the students’ ages and genders, then display for them whether they’ve qualified for the Presidential Award, National Award, or Participant Award.

The Fitness Tests area also provides several fitness charts that will be of great assistance to teachers and students. These charts can be viewed on the computer screen, or printed and posted for the students to see.

SporTEST Master Grader

Similar to the Master Grader Sub-Section in the Standards’ Knowledge Tests Section, this area will automatically score any and all other written tests designed by individual teachers.

In the SporTEST Section, teachers will design either a multiple choice, true/false, or fill-in-the-blank test. The students will then take the test, and the entire class’s tests will be imported into this Master Grader area, where the teacher will provide the answer key to which each student’s test will be compared.

Once scored, the students’ test grades can be recorded in PhysAssist™’s Grading Section to be included in the final grading calculation at the end of the term.

Master Import

This area of PhysAssist™ is provided to allow quick and easy student record creation. Schools already have a relatively complete database of information on the students in the school—information like the students’ names, student ID numbers, teachers, classes, birth dates, gender, etc.

Rather than manually entering this information into PhysAssist™, this Master Import area will manage the importing of that existing data in the school’s database, thereby saving a lot of time in the student record creation process.

PhysAssist™ Tutorial

The Tutorial provided with the PhysAssist™ program will enable teachers to begin using the program within minutes of launching the software for the first time. It really is that easy to use.

The Tutorial provides screen-by-screen, click-by-click instructions for each Section of the program, complete with screen-shots of each Section. The Tutorial can be viewed right on the computer monitor, or it can be printed.

Regardless of the Section of PhysAssist™ in which you’re working, the functionality is, by and large, the same. This means that once you’ve learned how to perform various procedures in one Section of PhysAssist™, you’ve really learned the entire program.

Conclusion

The above-written description of the PhysAssist™ Software Program is very brief in its communication of the variety of ways in which data can be entered, stored, organized, retrieved, sorted, compiled, displayed, and printed.

Each Section offers virtually unlimited possibilities in the grouping of data. Most Sections provide the flexibility to allow teachers to customize and optimize the data related features to their specific use.

Finally, all of the features and functions contained in PhysAssist™ can be accessed by the users of the program on either a locally installed version or a system-wide, network-installed version. The network version can store and organize the data of all users in an entire school system, and will be the version most likely to be used by student users of PhysAssist™ who will working in libraries or computer laboratories. 

The locally installed versions will only store and organize the data maintained by one individual user, that of one teacher. That individual teacher may also run the PhysAssist™ program on his or her hand-held computer. Data may then be synchronized with the user’s locally installed program. Periodically then, data stored locally on the individual teachers’ computers may be exported to a file that will then be imported by the network-installed version of PhysAssist™. Once imported, that data will be available to anyone authorized to access the network.

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