Background: Coláiste Dún Iascaigh, Co. Tipperary
Coláiste Dún Iascaigh is a co-educational secondary school located in Cahir, Co.Tipperary. Established in 1997, the school now serves over 900 students and is committed to providing an inclusive, well-rounded education that balances academic achievement with a strong extra-curricular programme.
Among its staff is Ed Burke, a physical education and maths teacher with a deep passion for Gaelic football. A former Munster U21 champion with Tipperary in 2010, Ed has coached a number of school teams as well as club and inter-county sides, most notably leading the Tipperary senior ladies football team to the TG4 All-Ireland Senior Ladies Football Championship Quarter-Final in 2025.
We spoke with Ed Burke about his experience with Athena FitnessMark.
Challenge: Reimagining How The School Approaches Fitness Testing and Reporting
Coláiste Dún Iascaigh has a strong and committed PE department which, as Ed explained, is constantly on the lookout for opportunities to improve the PE experience for their students.
“Our students love PE and our department wants to ensure that PE is both fun and educational for them. There has been lots of curricular change in our subject in recent years and this has given us the chance to breathe new life into our PE programmes.”
The school has always had a strong history of fitness testing students but Ed firmly believed that their processes could be improved upon.
“As part of our PE programme, we’ve always carried out fitness testing with all year groups, and our students love doing it. For years, we assessed the students’ fitness using tests like the T Test or long jump. We wrote all these results on paper but, inevitably, these results would get misplaced over time. There was almost no chance that a 1st year student would have that same piece of paper when they got to 2nd year, not to mind 6th year. While we were happy that we were carrying out the testing, the students weren’t getting much meaningful information from it and we knew that we could improve the entire practice.”
Coláiste Dún introduced Leaving Certificate Physical Education as an exam subject a few years ago. The school is now also teaching the Junior Cycle Physical Education Specification as well as the Senior Cycle Physical Education Specification. As Ed explained, these changes led the school’s PE department to rethink how they carried out physical fitness testing and reporting.
“The recent changes in the PE curriculum was the spark we needed to up our game when it came to fitness testing. Seeing physical fitness on all the specifications highlighted the importance of the area to us. We reached out to Athena Analytics to see if their FitnessMark platform could help us improve how we test and store results. We also wanted to know if the platform could help us with our Junior Cycle CBAs and with teaching, learning and assessment in Leaving Certificate PE.”
Solution: Intelligent Fitness Tracking With Athena FitnessMark
Mr. Burke was aware of Athena FitnessMark as the school was already using the Athena Tracker, and Athena FitnessMark felt like a logical next step. Having signed up for FitnessMark, the PE department was brought up to speed on the fitness tracking software where a member of the Athena Analytics team helped them to explore the various use cases.
As Ed outlined, the PE department focused in on two target use cases for the first year:
“We already carried out the same battery of fitness tests with all year groups so, in that first year, we simply wanted to house this information securely on the software. Thankfully, this was incredibly easy to do. The individual reports it generated were fabulous and, as a maths teacher, I was delighted with how they spoke my language with graphs, means and percentiles. These reports are something we’ve since started to give parents at parent-teacher meetings.
As well as that, we decided to use FitnessMark as a learning tool for our LCPE class. We knew that the data offered in FitnessMark would have significance and could be used to report on physical fitness results. We use the software to speak about technological advances in physical activity but also in analysing students’ performance. The software has been great for getting students more involved as they love comparing their performance to the Fitnessmark database. Many students use the results in their physical activity projects to set future fitness goals for themselves. Some also use the graphs generated in Athena FitnessMark as images in these projects.
Growing Athena FitnessMark Within the School
After the successful integration of FitnessMark in its initial year the PE department has expanded its use further to support assessment at Junior Cycle.
“We now use FitnessMark for our 2nd year students when they are doing their fitness CBA. They conduct a few tests, get their reports and develop improvement plans on some of their weaknesses. We get them to retest again at the end of the plan and we generate a new report for them. We were all a bit nervous about introducing the CBAs at the start but we have found that his approach works really well and is hugely motivating for many students. I can see the learning there.
Ed has further plans to develop Athena FitnessMark further, where he believes there is potential outside of the PE space.
“I’m definitely going to add my senior football team to the software next year. I see that we can now change our test battery so I’m going to come up with four or five I want the girls to do. I’m thinking of the 4x10m shuttle run, 10m sprint and maybe a bronco. It actually might be nice to introduce it to the junior team also.
Outside of that, we have been considering adding a fitness module to our TY programme and getting the TY students to help us implement tests in all year groups. I know Athena Analytics is doing a big study on this at the moment (see here) and it makes a lot of sense. The transition year students will learn a huge amount from the experience and carrying out the test themselves. While the teachers can focus on teaching and learning rather than carrying out administrative tasks such as setting up tests and taking results.”
