Assessment of basic aquatic skills in children: inter-rater reliability of coaches, teachers, students and parents

The process of learn-to-swim pursues the goal of comprehensive aquatic education. This results in extensive learning contents, even before a first in-water locomotion is possible. While there are different ways to quantify performance in swimming (e.g. time tracking), assessing basic aquatic skills solely refers to the teachers’ or coaches’ experience, if not gut instinct. Therefore, this study aimed to develop an easy-to-apply assessment tool that quantifies basic aquatic skills to help estimating the stages of development in children. To capture basic aquatic skills, 22 (pre)school children (non-swimmers) performed 19 developed consecutive tasks according to physical in-water characteristics. Performances were video recorded and rated by four peer groups (i.e., coaches, teachers, students, parents) using standardized evaluation sheets. Peers (total n=809) comprised different levels of swim teaching qualification and experience. Using the peer groups’ ratings, inter-rater reliability was computed. Findings revealed that the presented easy-to-apply assessment of basic aquatic skills (ABAS) is reliable according to substantial agreement between the peer groups’ ratings. Thus, ABAS has benefit for educational concepts and learning-to-swim classes.