At a Glance

At first glance, it is easy to say that the K-12 curriculum has been trimmed down. The question of whether the reduction is meaningful and significant is yet to be answered. By observation, the difference in the number of learning competencies from Kinder to Grade 6 are generally higher than from those that remain (high school, in particular). Note that for plotting, DepEd provided codes were used as bases.

The curriculum is supposed to be spiral. In our context, this is how spiraling looks like, according to DepEd. The question is, is it supposed to be really like this? Guided by the principles and theories in education, do these panels suggest that we have a nicely weaved curriculum? Where is Stats and Prob in grades 8 and 9 when it is present in grades 7 and 10? Are we not mistaken? Is there really a gap? (In fact there is an error in the codes presented by DepEd. Read further (Wrong codes section) to see. Grade 8 has stats and prob. But still, grade 9 manifests the gap.)

The question we are dying to address: Was there really a reduction in the number of learning competencies? Let us have a real quick view.

Problems to begin with

Duplicated LC

There is one K12_LC in the K12 curriculum that is duplicated. Notice that they are differently coded, too. (hit the right arrow to see)

This was actually addressed in MELC by writing a MELC_LC, which I coded as NEW just because I am not sure to which it is exactly is equivalent to in the K12 curriculum.

Duplicated CODES

UPDATE (12-15-2020): More duplicated codes found in K12 Kinder.

In the manual checking of MELC, one MELC_LC was observed to be duplicated as it appears in two different quarters. Not sure if DepEd really wants it this way.

Wrong codes

One strand in G8 is wrongly coded. It would appear that the codes are not 100% reliable. This error has been radiated to MELC as well. My wish is that for DepEd to be transparent on the information on how the codes were assigned by providing a short discussion about it within the curriculum, so that the meanings will make sense and allow errors such as this to be reported ASAP by curriculum users.

Changes as they say

What I did is to compare the competencies from the K12 curriculum to those in the MELC curriculum and to indicate in the MELC_CODE which K12_CODES were merged to form the new MELC_LC _ (underscore) was used to separate these merged K12_CODE. The worst case is that 6 K12_CODEs were all combined into one MELC_LC. This is not simply merging, in defense to DepEd. What they did is

  1. reduce verbs
    ex: “visualizes, represents, and compares” changed to “compares”
  2. separated but related competencies were combined in one grand competency
    ex: M1NS-IIa-26.1_M1NS-IIa-28.1a_M1NS-IIb-26.2_M1NS-IIb-27.1_M1NS-IIc-27.2_M1NS-IIc-27.3

add some more

Feel free to explore below the reduction that we are being told about. This shows the merging.

This shows the newly stated MELC_LC. I coded these as NEW because DepEd did not code them with a K12_CODE and so I assume that these are either 1. new competencies or 2. a mix of many K12_LCs. However, I can’t exactly point out which ones were merged. It appears that 2nd there could be coded similarly to how it was in K12_CODE. I am not sure tho because DepEd only used K12_CODE for exact matches only.