Antonio, What I do is take the learning objectives or daily topics as a basis for making a pretest. I determine out of everything the students are supposed to learn, what is the most important. From there, questions can be developed that assess either prior knowledge of a topic, or the degree to which students are familiar with the topic(s). A related method is to determine what students should know coming into the new class and building questions from it. Either way, the instructor learns something specific about the incoming students, and they should be more interested because you are focuising on material they need to learn. When students feel that they are apt to be attentive, focused, and engaged. Barry Westling