Ed,
My basic premise is two fold. One is to get a sense of prior learning, and the other is to tweak my instructional plan to more closely match what students will need to successfully complete the class. I begin with course objectives and try to identify what level of mastery a student would need to begin advancing their knowledge. Most course objectives inherently include multiple sub categories of topics, and I'll select (or create) questions from these topics to sample their level of performance. In general if 50% of the class fails to correctly answer a question, I use… >>>
