Abstract

A class filled will 30 adolescent boys and girls can prove to be a daunting task for any person.  Now imagine those 30 students’ at all 
different levels of understanding with a wealth of different knowledge as a result of different teachers, different life experiences, and different personalities. 
How does a teacher meet the needs of every student?  In this paper, I attempt to address this issue by looking at how pre-testing students prior
to the start of a unit can prove to be a quick and affective method of gathering data. 

A trial run of pre-testing was done in my seventh grade general math classroom on two pieces of my geometry unit. 
My ultimate goal was to gather data about the background knowledge that students were bringing into my classroom and use the
data to modify the curriculum to challenge the students who need challenging and to help
the students who may be below grade level.