In which teaching skill does testing of previous knowledge come?

Micro-teaching identifies several distinct teaching skills, each tied to a specific phase of a classroom lesson: introducing the lesson, presenting or demonstrating content, varying stimuli to sustain attention during the lesson, and concluding the lesson.

Testing (assessing) students' previous knowledge is a defining component of the Introductory Skill: before starting a new topic, the teacher probes what learners already know — through questions or brief discussion — and links that existing knowledge to the new lesson so the fresh content builds on a known foundation.

• Demonstration Skill is about showing an experiment, model, chart, or procedure so an abstract idea becomes concrete for learners — it operates during the body of the lesson to illustrate content, not to check what learners already know.

• Stimulus Variation Skill refers to the teacher deliberately varying voice, gestures, movement, teaching aids, or interaction pattern while teaching, purely to sustain learners' attention — again a during-lesson technique unrelated to assessing prior knowledge.

• Concluding Skill operates at the very end of a lesson, when the teacher summarizes and consolidates what has just been taught — the opposite point in the lesson from testing background knowledge before starting.

So the specific component of testing previous knowledge belongs to the Introductory Skill.