School assessment is an essential step in learning through its social purpose and its educational approach in order to maximize student’s learning. Teachers reflect daily on different types of assessment, their functions, criteria of assessment to be used in relation to expectations and learning. This study aims to investigate teachers' evaluative activity in high school and the impact it can have on students in physical education. The strengths and weaknesses of the current assessment emerged in the results of a survey. The results show that there are such disparate evaluation practices among teachers and, secondly, that they tend to reinterpret the formative assessment more as an intermediate summative assessment. Then, in an in vivo experiment that takes place in a collective activity in physical education (basketball), we are interested in students' motor and verbal behavior. The purpose of this experiment is to measure effects of different types of assessment on their learning and decisions. Moreover, the collective activity that has been proposed requires adaptation to others: this prompted us to take into account the socio-emotional relationships that structure the students' subgroups. Indeed they interact, are opposed, cooperate with peers who are not chosen, in evaluative situations. The analysis of students’ behavior shows the positive impact of formative assessment on learning and its role in preparing students for the summative evaluation, whatever the form of grouping students in a socio-emotional perspective. This research augurs at scientific level difficulties experienced by practitioners in assessments. In addition, it opens the way to a pedagogical reflection on the choice of assessment methods and student groupings in EPS.
