Decoding the Disciplines

Decoding the Disciplines is a process for increasing student learning by narrowing the gap between expert and novice thinking. Beginning with the identification of bottlenecks to learning in particular disciplines, it seeks to make explicit the tacit knowledge of experts and to help students master the mental actions they need for success in particular courses.

Guiding questions in the Decoding process

The Decoding process is structured by seven questions. In the Decoding literature these questions usually are referred to as steps. The order of the steps is not mandatory and can be changed as needed.

Question 1: Where do I experience a bottleneck to learning?

Answering this question is usually the starting point of the Decoding process. Instructors identify an activity or task in their course that students are supposed to learn but often fail. The activity may well be a mental activity.

Question 2: What do students have to be able to do to get past the bottleneck?

This questions leads to a key activity of the Decoding process: Instructors explore in depths the steps that disciplinary experts go through to accomplish the activity or task identified as a bottleneck. This exploration is often carried out via a Decoding Interview with typically two interviewers helping the instructor to make his or her expertise explicit.

Question 3: How can I show students what they have to do?

A way for instructors to do this is by modeling or demonstrating how they accomplish these activities as an expert. In order to do so, instructors may

• perform the (mental) steps in front of your students using a subject-specific example.
• explicitly highlight critical operations.
• use metaphors or analogies for the (mental) steps.

Question 4: How can I give my students practice and feedback?

Often instructors provide their students with tasks or learning activities that allow students to perform the activity identified as a bottleneck and receive feedback.

Question 5: How can I deal with emotional bottlenecks to learning?

The Decoding the Disciplines process can lead to considerable changes in teaching. Students might resist such changes. These resistances can be viewed as a further kind of bottleneck which is emotional rather than cognitive. Instructors are encouraged to anticipate such resistances in order to better cope with them.

Question 6: How can I know if my students have mastered these operations?

In order to find out, instructors give assessments that provide information on the degree to which students can perform the activity identified as a bottleneck.

Question 7: How can I share this process with others?

Instructors may share their findings informally with colleagues or more formally through publications or presentations as a form of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. As of 2023 instructors and researchers have published more than 500 articles on Decoding.

History

Decoding the Disciplines has been pioneered by Joan Middendorf and David Pace at Indiana University. David Pace has summarized intentions and goals of this early phase of Decoding the Disciplines as follows:

The Decoding the Disciplines approach emerged from a desire to develop new responses to common blocks to learning in college courses. As directors of the Indiana University Freshman Learning Project from 1998 to 2010, Joan Middendorf and David Pace perceived a mismatch between what was being taught to students in many classes and what was actually required for success in these courses. The very expertise of college instructors had made many essential procedures of the disciplines so automatic that these had become invisible and, thus, were not being taught. Students, trying to respond to the demands of their courses, were often unintentionally given conceptual maps of the field that lacked instructions for surmounting crucial challenges. It was as if their instructors had provided their students with the kind of itinerary produced by Google Maps, but had inadvertently omitted many lines of the instructions. Students who were already familiar with the territory found their way with little difficulty. A few students with usual skills at pathfinding turned the limited set of clues at their disposal into a strategy for reaching the destination. But others, who were not pre-educated in the field or endowed with a special predisposition for the discipline, became hopelessly lost.

Decoding the Disciplines as a framework

Decoding is highly integrated and integrative. It combines elements of research on expertise and misconceptions, of professional development, of coaching, of collegial counseling, and of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning into a process of teaching development, which acknowledges the difficulties students have in learning subject-specific patterns of thought and action as inherent to processes of teaching and learning. Decoding focuses on the difficulty of the subject matter in a systemic way. It avoids infertile thinking that seeks the failure of teaching primarily among students, or in a wrong selection of teaching method.