Strategy 1 - One of the strategies you may use to determine if curriculum compacting might be of value would be to provide the opportunity for students to try the “most difficult first” approach. When assigning independent seatwork highlight about five of the most difficult problems or questions. Inform your class that you understand some of them may feel they already know everything of importance in this particular unit.
Let them know they will have the opportunity to answer the five selected problems you highlighted. When they finish they are to bring the work up to you to check. If they have successfully answered five out of the five correctly they are probably ready for compacted curriculum for the length of the unit.
Strategy 2 - Another strategy used to help determine if a student may benefit from curriculum compacting is pretesting volunteers. Before you begin a new unit of study offer volunteers the opportunity of taking the end of the unit assessment before the unit is actually taught. If the student scores 95 percent or above, he/she has definitely demonstrated mastery of that information. One of our main goals as a teacher should always be to help every student make learning gains, and develop a love of learning along the way. If the student already knows the content you are going to present, very little to no new learning will take place.