The FTCE Physical Education K–12 examination (test code 063) is the Florida subject area examination for certification to teach physical education in kindergarten through grade 12. It is a computer-based test (CBT) of approximately 80 multiple-choice questions in 2 hours and 30 minutes, weighted across thirteen competencies, the largest of which — developmentally appropriate instructional strategies — carries 13 percent. The passing score, in the Florida Department of Education’s published form, is: A scaled score of at least 200. The FLDOE/Pearson examination fee is $150.
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The examination at a glance
| Item | Verified position |
|---|---|
| Examination | FTCE Physical Education K–12 — Florida Teacher Certification Examinations, test code 063 |
| Certification | Subject area examination for Florida’s Physical Education (K-12) certificate — teaching physical education in grades K–12 |
| Format | Computer-based test (CBT) with approximately 80 multiple-choice questions. Tests may include questions being evaluated for future administrations that do not affect the score |
| Length | 2 hours and 30 minutes of testing time; total appointment time is longer, and any time taken for breaks is considered part of the available testing time |
| Content | Thirteen competencies under the official Test Information Guide: Instructional Strategies 13%; Movement Skills and Concepts 12%; Lifetime Health, Wellness, and Physical Fitness 12%; Curriculum Development 10%; Assessment Strategies 10%; Human Growth, Development, and Motor Learning 8%; Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Development 7%; Effective Learning Environment 7%; Safety, Rules, Strategies, and Terminology 5%; Technology 5%; History and Philosophy 3%; Laws, Legislation, and Liabilities 4%; Professional Ethics, Advocacy, and Development 4% — percentages are the guide’s approximate percentages of total test questions |
| Passing score | A scaled score of at least 200 |
| Examination fee | FLDOE/Pearson fee: $150 |
| Reference materials | None provided for this test |
| Delivery and scores | By appointment, year-round, at computer-based test sites throughout Florida and nationwide. On-site score reports are typically provided immediately after testing; all official score reports are released within 4 weeks of testing |
| Administrator | The Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) owns the FTCE program; Pearson administers the examinations. PassProfessor is independent and is not affiliated with FLDOE or Pearson |
The FTCE Physical Education K–12 examination measures the knowledge of a beginning Florida physical education teacher across the entire age span the certificate covers. Read the blueprint’s architecture before you read its contents: there is no dominant competency. The heaviest — instructional strategies — carries 13 percent; movement skills and lifetime fitness follow at 12 percent each; curriculum and assessment sit at 10 percent each; and eight further competencies run from 8 percent down to 3 percent. That flat, fragmented architecture, not any textbook’s table of contents and not any candidate’s playing history, is the syllabus. This guide treats all thirteen competencies at their published weights, skill by skill, because the Test Information Guide’s fifty-nine skills are the finest-grained public statement of what can be asked.
Reading the verified facts
Every fact in the table above is stated as the administering program states it in its own publications, because candidates are ill-served by the approximations that circulate about this examination. Three disciplines govern this guide. First, the figures given are the program’s figures, from the official test page and Test Information Guide named in this file’s INTERNAL section; where those documents do not publish a figure, this guide prints none rather than borrowing one. That matters for the item count: the current official test page, Test Information Guide, and FLDOE test structure information all give approximately 80 multiple-choice questions, and that is the figure used throughout. Older and third-party material giving a larger count is not current. Second, the passing standard is given only in FLDOE’s published form — a scaled score of at least 200. FLDOE’s “Maximum Percentages Needed” table is a guideline for interpreting scaled scores; it is not a passing score, does not convert 200 into a share of questions answered correctly, and third parties who present a percentage as the cut score are misreading it. Third, the competency percentages are the Test Information Guide’s approximate percentages — planning weights, not a published count of questions per competency, and this guide does not convert them into one. Finally: the companion PassProfessor program is in the works and unbuilt — nothing here describes a question bank, a course, or an enrollment that exists today.
The route, step by step
Step 1 — Confirm the examination with the Bureau
The Florida Bureau of Educator Certification decides which tests you need, after you apply for certification. Confirm that the FTCE Physical Education K–12 examination (063) is the subject area examination required on your file. Two confusions live at this step. The first is historical: “Physical Education 6–12” and “Physical Education K–8” appear in older Florida material as certification areas, but they are discontinued — the only current physical education examination is the K–12 examination, code 063. A candidate who prepares under a discontinued name has spent the season on the wrong object. The second is neighbouring-subject confusion: health and physical education are distinct Florida credentials with distinct examinations, and preparation for one does not substitute for the other.
Step 2 — Prepare from the official guide
The program publishes a Test Information Guide for this examination: the test design, the competencies and skills with the blueprint percentages, sample test questions, and preparation resources. It also publishes a tutorial for the computer-based test experience. Work from the guide’s skills as your syllabus — each of the fifty-nine skills is a statement of something the examination may ask, phrased in the program’s own verbs. Note FLDOE’s own position, stated on the program’s resource pages, when you weigh any outside material including this guide: the Department does not endorse third-party FTCE preparation materials and recommends its own Test Information Guides and resources.
Step 3 — Register and schedule
Registration runs through the official FTCE program site. Tests are by appointment, year-round; you schedule your test during registration, based on available dates, at computer-based test sites throughout Florida and nationwide. The FLDOE/Pearson examination fee is $150. When you register you must agree to abide by all testing rules and policies — the program asks you to read them at registration, and the break policy in particular deserves the reading: any time taken for breaks is considered part of your available testing time.
Step 4 — Sit the examination
Arrive for an appointment longer than the 2 hours and 30 minutes of testing time it contains. The examination is approximately 80 multiple-choice questions, delivered as a computer-based test (CBT). No reference materials are provided for this test — no standards document, no fitness table, no rules digest; the knowledge the competencies name must be held, not looked up. The test may include questions being evaluated for future administrations that do not affect your score; they cannot be identified, so the only sound strategy is full effort on every item.
Step 5 — Read the result in the program’s terms
On-site score reports are typically provided immediately after testing — the program’s own caveat is that on-site reporting may not be available for tests being redeveloped or revised — and all official score reports are released within 4 weeks of testing. Read the result against the published standard and in the published form: a scaled score of at least 200. If the sitting did not clear the standard, the rebuild begins from the blueprint, not from a percentage: with thirteen competencies and no dominant one, the diagnostic question is never “how far short” but “which competencies” — and the answer almost always includes at least one small professional competency that content study never reached.
The blueprint in full
Competency 1: Knowledge of the History and Philosophy of the Physical Education Profession — 3% (2 skills)
Skill 1 examines historical events and trends that have influenced the profession, with analyze attached to the trends: what shaped the profession, not merely what happened in it. Skill 2 examines physical education’s goals and values related to the philosophies of education they reflect — a described program must be matched to the philosophy underneath it. At two skills and 3 percent, this is the blueprint’s most bounded competency: master it completely.
Competency 2: Knowledge of Standards-Based Physical Education Curriculum Development — 10% (5 skills)
Skill 1 examines the characteristics of various curriculum models, identified and differentiated — what distinguishes one model from another, not their names alone. Skill 2 examines factors in curriculum planning: student ability, time (class duration, time of day, frequency), environment, equipment, facilities, space, and community resources — planning as constraint management. Skill 3 examines how national and state documents, standards, benchmarks, and philosophies are used to design curricula. Skill 4 examines long- and short-term planning — scope and sequence, annual, unit, and lesson plans, and emergency plans — applied to maximise participation and success, at every level of the hierarchy. Skill 5 examines cross-curricular content for physical education learning experiences. Its items describe settings, resources, and populations, and ask what the plan should be.
Competency 3: Knowledge of Developmentally Appropriate Physical Education Instructional Strategies — 13% (6 skills)
Skill 1 examines strategies and adaptations for the diverse needs of all students: cultural, linguistic, cognitive, motor, and experiential. Skill 2 examines teaching styles, communication delivery systems, and materials, distinguished from one another. Skill 3 examines motivational theories and techniques. Skill 4 — the analytic centre — examines developmentally appropriate, research-based teaching methods, and its verb is analyze: evaluate a described strategy against the learners and the objective. Skill 5 examines feedback as a strategy — an instrument with timing, specificity, and focus, not praise in general. Skill 6 examines differentiated instructional practices. At 13 percent, and with its adaptation logic recurring in the movement and assessment competencies, mastery here pays beyond its own weight.
Competency 4: Knowledge of Human Growth and Development and Motor Learning as They Relate to Physical Education — 8% (4 skills)
Skill 1 examines developmentally appropriate practices demonstrating knowledge of human growth and development. Skill 2 examines learning theories applied to a positive environment supporting psychomotor, cognitive, and affective development — all three domains in one skill. Skill 3 examines principles of motor development and motor learning applied to skill acquisition: how a movement is acquired, practised, and retained. Skill 4 examines sequential progression of motor skill development — what comes next for a given learner. This competency is the scientific warrant for every “appropriate” elsewhere: hold the developmental sequence and you can reason to the appropriate practice; without it, you are guessing at the blueprint’s most repeated judgement.
Competency 5: Knowledge of Developmentally Appropriate Movement Skills and Concepts Related to Physical Education — 12% (7 skills)
Skill 1 examines movement concepts — spatial awareness, body awareness, relationships, and effort. Skill 2 examines the fundamental movement patterns in their three families: locomotor, nonlocomotor, and manipulative skills. Skill 3 examines sequentially progressive activities promoting skill acquisition in the psychomotor, cognitive, and affective domains. Skill 4 examines appropriate cues and prompts for teaching movement skills — the short verbal instrument by which a teacher changes a movement. Skill 5 examines mechanical principles of motion applied to movement. Skill 6 examines analysis of a skill or movement sequence to identify how students can improve — error analysis, the diagnostic counterpart of Skill 4’s cues. Skill 7 examines how skill-related fitness affects performance. Together the seven skills describe a working cycle — observe, analyse the mechanics, select the cue, sequence the progression — not performance of any single sport skill.
Competency 6: Knowledge of Lifetime Health, Wellness, and Physical Fitness — 12% (9 skills)
Skill 1 examines data from physical fitness assessments, analysed, with strategies selected to improve health-related fitness — the clearest data-to-decision skill on the blueprint. Skill 2 examines the health-related components in a personal fitness program. Skill 3 examines nutrition and exercise for all students. Skill 4 examines health risks and benefits of physical activity — both sides of the ledger. Skill 5 examines training principles applied to improve personal fitness. Skill 6 examines exercises for the major muscle groups. Skill 7 examines how body systems — muscular, cardiovascular, nervous, skeletal — adapt to physical activity: change over time, not the acute response to one bout. Skill 8 examines physical education’s contributions to lifetime health, wellness, and fitness. Skill 9 examines community opportunities for participation — where activity continues after schooling ends. With nine skills this is the widest competency as well as one of the heaviest; schedule it as two blocks — fitness science (Skills 1, 2, 5, 6, 7) and health-and-lifetime (Skills 3, 4, 8, 9).
Competency 7: Knowledge of Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Development Through Physical Education and Physical Activity — 7% (4 skills)
Skill 1 examines physical education’s role in developing an understanding of diversity. Skill 2 examines its role in developing responsible behaviours and values. Skill 3 examines the intellectual, sociological, and psychological benefits of participation. Skill 4 examines factors in social and emotional health through activity — communication skills, self-concept, fair play, conflict resolution, character development, and stress management. Its items ask what a described activity develops socially and emotionally, and the answers lie in the activity’s design — grouping, competition structure, responsibility given — not its name.
Competency 8: Knowledge of Various Types of Assessment Strategies That Can Be Used to Determine Student Levels and Needs in Physical Education — 10% (6 skills)
Skills 1, 2, and 3 form the spine: assessment strategies, authentic and traditional, for the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains respectively. The parallel construction is examinable — a strategy appropriate in one domain is frequently the distractor in another. Skill 4 examines assessment strategies for curriculum design, lesson planning, and program evaluation, analysed — assessment at program level. Skill 5 examines assessment for an inclusive environment. Skill 6 examines physical fitness assessment strategies, connecting back to Competency 6: the fitness assessment chosen here produces the data analysed there. Assessment here is matching — instrument to domain, purpose, and setting — and mismatch is the item form.
Competency 9: Knowledge of Strategies That Promote an Effective Learning Environment — 7% (4 skills)
Skill 1 examines selecting and maintaining equipment and facilities to enhance learning. Skill 2 examines organisational strategies — rituals and routines, maximum participation, rules and standards. Skill 3 examines supervisory and behavioural management techniques. Skill 4 examines appropriate action for the care and prevention of injuries — placed in the environment competency because injury prevention here is an organisational act before a clinical one. Teach the competency around one quantity: active, supervised participation time, which routines, equipment, grouping, and supervision all serve.
Competency 10: Knowledge of Laws, Legislation, and Liabilities That Pertain to Physical Education — 4% (2 skills)
Skill 1 examines major federal and state legislation impacting physical education. Skill 2 examines legal liabilities applicable to it. Two skills, examined straight — a bounded body of high-consequence knowledge to learn completely, not sample. Its reasoning also informs Competency 9’s injury skill and Competency 11’s safety considerations: understand the standard of care underlying all three rather than memorising three lists.
Competency 11: Knowledge of Appropriate Safety Considerations, Rules, Strategies, and Terminology Related to Physical Education and a Variety of Physical Activities — 5% (3 skills)
Skill 1 examines rules and strategies of play applied to game and sport situations. Skill 2 examines terminology for physical education and physical activities. Skill 3 examines safety considerations for a variety of activity settings. The operative phrase is variety: preparation concentrated in one sport, however deep, covers a fraction of the skills. Teach this competency breadth-first, with safety treated as setting-specific rather than generic.
Competency 12: Knowledge of Professional Ethics, Advocacy, and Development — 4% (3 skills)
Skill 1 examines professional development experiences that enhance effectiveness, collaboration, and student performance. Skill 2 examines professional organisations, literature, research, and other resources — a code of ethics among them — for continuous improvement. Skill 3 examines ways to advocate for physical education. Advocacy here is blueprint content, not an attitude: identifiable ways a physical educator advances the subject’s place in a school.
Competency 13: Knowledge of the Appropriate Use of Technology as Related to Physical Education — 5% (4 skills)
Skill 1 examines technology’s appropriate uses in instruction. Skill 2 examines its uses in assessing student performance. Skill 3 examines how technology supports cross-curricular learning. Skill 4 examines ways all students can use technology — access for every learner, echoing the inclusive logic of Competencies 3 and 8. All four skills share the qualifier appropriate: items judge fit between a tool, a purpose, and a movement-centred setting, not inventories of devices.
The sitting itself: format, sources, scoring, and what follows
The arithmetic of the sitting is the first discipline. Approximately 80 questions in 150 minutes allows a little under two minutes an item on average — but the average conceals the blueprint’s effect. With thirteen competencies in one paper, the sitting changes subject constantly: a curriculum item, then a motor-learning item, then a liability item, then a fitness-data item. The pacing risk is the reset cost of switching registers, not the long scenario alone. Work steadily, mark items consuming a second item’s time, and return with the faster marks banked. Answer every item: the test may contain questions being evaluated for future administrations that do not affect your score, they cannot be identified, and no blank can earn anything.
The clock does not pause. Any time taken for breaks is considered part of the available testing time, per the official test page, so a break is a spending decision, not a rest — take one if it buys back more concentration than it costs minutes, and know the price before you stand up.
Scoring is reported in the program’s own terms, and this guide keeps them. The standard is a scaled score of at least 200. A scaled score is not a percentage and does not disclose one: FLDOE does not publish a conversion from the scaled standard to a number or share of questions answered correctly for this examination, and its “Maximum Percentages Needed” table — a guideline that circulates widely in third-party material, sometimes presented as if it were the passing score — is not the standard. The standard is the sentence FLDOE publishes, and it is the only version of the standard in this guide. On-site score reports are typically provided immediately after testing, with the redevelopment caveat noted in the route section; official reports follow within 4 weeks.
What this examination is for
A note on this page’s place in the PassProfessor catalog, stated plainly: the catalog’s FTCE coverage spans the General Knowledge Test, the Professional Education Test, and subject area examinations including Elementary Education K–6 and Exceptional Student Education K–12. The FTCE Physical Education K–12 examination had no program of its own in that coverage. This guide and its companion program page close that gap, covering this examination’s blueprint, route, and standard — and nothing borrowed from neighbouring examinations’ blueprints, from discontinued physical education areas, or from any health examination, which is a different Florida credential.
Preparation errors this guide is written to prevent
The recurring errors are structural, and they repeat across sittings. Candidates prepare from playing, coaching, or fitness experience and discover that the blueprint examines the teaching of movement — curriculum, instruction, assessment, environment — more heavily than movement itself. Candidates study evenly, or by personal interest, across a blueprint whose weights run from 13 percent to 3 percent, and leave the heaviest competencies underprepared while polishing the lightest. Candidates skip the professional cluster — laws and liabilities, safety and rules, learning environment, ethics and advocacy, technology, a combined quarter of the paper — because it does not look like physical education as they practised it. Candidates study one age level, usually the one they intend to teach, when the certificate and the examination both span kindergarten through grade 12 and “developmentally appropriate” changes its correct answer with the age described. Candidates assess, in their heads, only the psychomotor domain, when the assessment competency examines three domains in parallel. And candidates carry a percentage in their heads as the passing standard, because a third-party page printed one, or an item count from superseded material, and misjudge both their practice results and their preparation. Every section of this guide is aimed at one of those errors.
After the examination
Passing the FTCE Physical Education K–12 examination satisfies the subject area examination requirement attached to Florida’s Physical Education (K-12) certificate. It is one component of a certification file administered by the Bureau of Educator Certification, and the bodies that will ask for the result later ask in their own formats and on their own timelines. Keep the official score report, and note the standard you were measured against in the form it was published — a scaled score of at least 200 — since a scaled result cannot be reconstructed from memory or from a percentage someone else attached to it. The credential it supports is the all-grades one described in the companion program page: a teacher assignable from elementary movement education to high school fitness, which is the span the thirteen competencies were built to certify.
A preparation plan that respects the blueprint
Build the plan on the blueprint’s weights, not on habit, a textbook’s order, or your strongest activity background. Open with the three heaviest competencies — instructional strategies at 13 percent and movement skills and lifetime fitness at 12 percent each, 37 percent between them — each in its skills’ published sequence. Then take curriculum and assessment at 10 percent each, treating assessment’s three domain skills as one unit. Work human growth and motor learning next, because its developmental sequence is the reasoning tool the “developmentally appropriate” competencies reuse. Then give the professional cluster — cognitive, social, and emotional development, learning environment, safety and rules, technology, laws and liabilities, ethics and advocacy — a deliberate block, not the leftover hours: together they are a quarter of the paper, where otherwise strong candidates lose sittings. Close with history and philosophy, smallest and most bounded, mastered completely. Throughout, practise every skill at more than one age level — a cue, a progression, an assessment, an adaptation worked for a young child and for an adolescent. Convert every skill into worked items early: this blueprint tests application and analysis. Reserve complete timed sittings — approximately 80 questions inside 2 hours and 30 minutes, breaks counted as the real sitting counts them — for the final stage, under examination conditions. Keep a running record by competency, and let it set the final week’s work. The companion FTCE Physical Education K–12 Exam Preparation page describes the preparation program itself, which is in the works; this guide stands on its own as the route and blueprint reference for this examination.
Frequently asked questions
Why does no competency carry more than 13 percent of the examination?
Because the certificate spans the whole work of a physical education teacher, and the blueprint distributes its weight accordingly — across curriculum, instruction, movement, fitness, development, assessment, environment, law, safety, ethics, and technology. Thirteen competencies at 3 to 13 percent means breadth is the central demand: no single topic’s mastery carries a sitting, and none is small enough to skip safely except by deliberate decision.
Why is there no percentage for the passing score?
Because the program does not publish one as the standard. The passing score for the FTCE Physical Education K–12 examination is published as: a scaled score of at least 200. FLDOE’s “Maximum Percentages Needed” table is a guideline for interpreting scores, not a passing score, and any percentage presented by a third party as this examination’s cut score misstates the standard.
I coach a sport. How much of this examination does that cover?
Part of two competencies: rules and strategies of play sit inside Competency 11 (5 percent), and sport-related movement knowledge supports part of Competency 5 (12 percent) — but both range across a variety of activities, and the remaining competencies examine curriculum, instruction, assessment, development, law, safety, and professional practice, which coaching alone does not teach. Coaching is a head start on a minority of the blueprint, not a substitute for preparing the whole of it.
What does “developmentally appropriate” actually require me to know?
A sequence and its consequences. Competency 4 publishes the underlying science — human growth and development, motor learning, and the sequential progression of motor skill development — and Competencies 3 and 5 examine its application: which strategy, activity, cue, or progression fits the learner’s stage. The same content taught at the wrong stage is, on this blueprint, the wrong answer, which is why the phrase appears in the titles of competencies carrying 33 percent of the paper combined.
Is the examination the same as a health examination?
No. Physical education and health are distinct Florida credentials with distinct subject area examinations. This guide covers FTCE Physical Education K–12 (063) only — its competencies concern movement, fitness, and the teaching of physical activity — and preparation for a health examination does not substitute for it, or it for a health examination.
How are the competency percentages meant to be used?
As planning weights. The Test Information Guide publishes them as approximate percentages of total test questions, so they tell you how to divide preparation time — they are not a published count of questions per competency, and this guide does not convert them into one.
Does the clock stop for breaks?
No. The official test page states that any time taken for breaks is considered part of your available testing time. Plan breaks as spending from the same 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Why does an activity subject examine law, ethics, and advocacy?
Because the practising conditions of the subject make them professional necessities. Physical education involves supervised physical activity, so liability and safety are live professional knowledge; the subject’s place in the timetable is contested, so advocacy is examined as a professional skill; and ethics govern a teacher whose assessments are of students’ bodies and physical performance. The blueprint weights that cluster at a combined 25 percent — the examination takes it as seriously as it takes the paper to say so.
How should the 2 hours and 30 minutes be paced?
At an average of a little under two minutes an item, treated as a budget rather than a metronome: bank the fast recall items, mark and move past any scenario item consuming a second item’s time, and return with the paper complete. Full-length timed practice at the real shape — approximately 80 items, 150 minutes, breaks on the clock — is how the pace becomes automatic.
Where do this guide’s facts come from?
From the program’s own publications — the official test page for Physical Education K–12 (test code 063) and the official Test Information Guide’s competencies, skills, and blueprint — recorded in this file’s INTERNAL section. Facts that could not be verified from those sources were omitted rather than borrowed.