Ways to Assess Students’ Prior Knowledge. In order to gauge how much students have learned, it is not enough to assess their knowledge and skills at the end of the course or program. We also need to find out what they know coming in, that is, their prior knowledge, so that we can identify more specifically the knowledge and skills they have gained during the course or program and also to identify those misconceptions that can interfere with their new learning. Here are several techniques suggested by the teaching center at Carnegie Mellon.
