Curriculum Compacting

Curriculum compacting is a flexible, research-supported instructional technique for modifying the regular curriculum to meet the needs of high ability students. This technique is a form of content acceleration that enables high-ability students to skip work they already know and substitute more challenging content. The goals of compacting are to streamline work that may be mastered at a pace commensurate with the student's ability, create a challenging learning environment, guarantee proficiency in basic curriculum, and buy time for enrichment and acceleration (Reis and Renzulli, 1992).

According to Reis and Renzulli, the following eight steps are involved:

1. Select the learning objectives for a given subject.
   
2. Find or create an appropriate way to pretest or alternatively assess competencies related to these objectives.
   
3. Identify students who may have mastered the objectives, or have the potential to master them at a faster than normal pace, or pretest all students in the classroom.
   
4. Pretest students-before beginning instruction-on one or more of the objectives.
   
5. Streamline practice, drill or instructional time for students who have learned the objectives.
   
6. Provide instructional options for students who have not yet attained all the pretested objectives, but generally learn faster than their classmates.
   
7. Organize and recommend enrichment or acceleration options for eligible students.
   
8. Keep records of the process and instructional options available to students whose curriculum has been compacted for reporting to parents and forward these records to next year's teachers.
   (From the National Research Center on Gifted and Talented: http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/vcurcomp.html)