Steven, Pretesting is really for the teacher to know what prior knowledge the students arrive with. It's a planning tool on where to make adjustments. Getting to know your students is a great thing too, but a bit different from the purpose of the pretest. Both activities are great, I'm just saying they're different activities with different purposes. If these were tools, we'd have a saw and a hammer. Both are tools, but with quite different purposes. But both extremely useful in building something. Just like we want to build something in class - increased learning! Barry Westling