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.

Steps in the Decoding process

Step 1: Identify a bottleneck to learning

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Step 2: Uncover the mental tasks needed to overcome the bottleneck

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Step 3: Model these tasks

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Step 4: Give students practice and feedback

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Step 5: Motivate and lessen resistance

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Step 6: Assess student mastery

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Step 7: Share what has been learned through the Decoding process

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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

relation to other frameworks