Giving "pretests" has never been a big part of my teaching (and with Latin, there's really not much point when students are such novices). But there's research that suggests I may want to give it a try in my World History courses.

But the emerging study of pretesting flips that logic on its head. “Teaching to the test” becomes “learning to understand the pretest,” whichever one the teacher chooses to devise. The test, that is, becomes an introduction to what students should learn, rather than a final judgment on what they did not.