Hi Phyllis: I believe teachers can use pretests as a gauge to where the emphasis should be based on the results of pretesting. Why waste time on information if students are mostly familiar with the some of the material already? At the same time, a teacher may expect students to be able to perform at a certain level and find that that overall, performance is much lower than expected. So here, the emphasis shift would be to possibly sacrifice some higher-level material for basic, foundational lessons. Of course, all of the objectives for a course have to be met. But individualizing it to improve learning is better than students just tuning out, flunking, or loosing interest in the material because they don't understand. Regards, Barry