Pretests Can Save Teachers Precious Time

When Jim Baxter was the assessment maven at Martin Luther King Elementary in Los Angeles USD in the late 1980s, he had a hunch. Teachers were working too hard at the start of the year, marching all kids through their math textbook, starting with chapter one, when many kids might have been able to start at a later chapter. If his hunch proved to be true, teachers could save precious instructional time, just by starting each student at the point in the textbook that matched their level of mastery.

Jim also had a method for testing his hunch: pretesting. Working with the higher elementary grades in this K–6 school, he took questions from the back of each of the first four chapters of the textbook and built a pretest. Instead of waiting for the back-of-the-chapter test to be given at the end of the lesson, Jim reversed the sequence with this pretest strategy.

What he learned surprised principal Judy Burton as well as the teachers themselves. About 75 percent of the students knew about 80 percent of the material in the first three chapters. By identifying which students had attained this level of mastery, Jim enabled teachers to match each student with the right chapter of the textbook. This saved teachers and 75 percent of the students about 20 days of instructional time that would have been wasted reteaching them what they already knew.