What Is It?
................How Do You Do It?
.......................................... and Does it Work?
Curriculum compacting is one way to meet the needs of gifted students
in the regular classroom. It involves eliminating the repetition of
work that has already been mastered and streamlining lessons that "can
be mastered at a pace commensurate with the student's motivation and
ability." (p. 165) The process also assists teachers with
accountability by documenting student proficiency on instructional
objectives and listing specifically what enrichment activities are
offered in place of repetitive classwork.
The process of compacting includes three phases - defining goals and
outcomes, identifying candidates for compacting, and providing
acceleration and enrichment options.
First of all, goals and outcomes of the given unit of instruction
should be defined. Determine which of the tasks are new material as
opposed to review of old material from past units. Scope-and-sequence
charts can be useful in this part of the process. Teachers need to be
able to make individual programming decisions.
Secondly, candidates for compacting must be identified. If you have
had the students for awhile, you will likely be able to estimate which
students you think may have the ability to master material faster than
the majority of the class. Also useful in this step are scores on
previous units and tests, observing student participation and
motivation as well as the desire to do more and/or different work than the
regular class. In this phase, it is also necessary to evaluate
specific learning outcomes. Pretests are especially useful in doing
this as they allow easy documentation of previously mastered
material and show specifically any areas that may need practice.
The third part of the compacting process is to provide acceleration
and enrichment options. This should be done cooperatively with the
student to best increase academic challenge and meet his/her
needs. Try to choose activities that fit student interest and
strengths rather than more of the same seatwork or random games. Some
students who see this process in action will realize they can earn
time to do self-selected projects and increase motivation in mastering
regular work more rapidly.
In my first year of teaching I had a sixth grade heterogenously
grouped math class which I consistently gave pretests to at the
beginning of the units. Often I found that most of the class had
mastered certain topics which we were able to breeze through quickly,
whereas some topics they had no previous experience with required
extra time and attention. In this way I was able to streamline my
entire curriculum to better meet the needs of the entire class. In the
reading/spelling class, anyone who got a 95% or higher on the spelling
unit pretest automatically scored that for the unit without having to
do all the homework or final test. They could write stories or poems with the
spelling words in them for extra credit if they wished. These students
were allowed to do free reading during the class time for that
spelling unit. In these ways I managed to do some basic curriculum
compacting that improved my teaching.
Curriculum Compactors are forms that have been developed to help with
the documentation of this method of providing enrichment. They should
be kept in a student's academic file and updated as needed. They have
three colums. The first one, titled "Areas to be considered for
compacting" should include information on the learning objectives and
student proficiency in these objectives. The second column,
"Procedures for compacting basic material" describes specifically
which activities are used to document proficiency, such as which
pretests and what the student scored on each part of it. Attaching the
pretest to the compactor might be a good method of documentation as
well. The third column, "Acceleration and/or Enrichment Activities" is
to describe the replacement activities the student will be engaged in
during the time saved by the compacting process. The activities should
focus on student interests, abilities and preferences. This is a
potential time for students to work on Type IIIs (see the section on
Schoolwide Enrichment Model).
The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented conducted "The
Curriculum Compacting Study" aka "Why Not Let High Ability Students
Start School in January?" in 1990-91. Published in 1993, this research
monograph demonstrates that students who are compacted
regularly do not lose ground in the academic areas that are
compacted, and in fact achieve at or above the levels of control groups
in the same subjects by end of the year. The following is, in my
opinion, the most important finding of this study:
"..standardized achievement tests were administered in this study to
find out if compacting was detrimental to students' achievement, as
measured by standardized tests. Results indicated that in reading,
mathematical concepts and computation, spelling, and social studies,
there were no significant differences among all treatment groups and
the control group in pre/post achievement. This indicates that when
40-50% of content is eliminated in the regular curriculum, achievement
test scores are not affected -- their scores, relative to their peers,
- do not go down! In fact, for science achievement and mathematical
concepts performances on out-of-level achievement tests,
compacting the curriculum resulted in more positive outcomes
for treatment group students than for the control group." (p. 85 of
"The Curriculum Compacting Study" by the NRCGT.)
The information regarding the specifics of how to do compacting is
gathered from Schools for Talent Development: A Practical Plan for
Total School Involvement copyright 1994 by Joseph Renzulli,
Chapter 6- Curriculum Modification Techniques, pp. 165-170, combined
with my (W. Chapman's) own experience and understanding of the
compacting process.