Decoding Transitions to College

The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project

The Vision

One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education.  There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.

In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows used the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking) in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

Outcomes

Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this knowledge is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the Decoding interviews had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

Evidence of Success

Testimony from Participants

When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both within and outside their disciplines. But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.”  And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

• "Decoding Beyond the University" -- a July 2025 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
• Excerpts from a panel at the September 2025 FALCON Conference in which teachers describe how the Decoding Transitions to College Project helped them reshape introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.(Thanks to FALCON and FACET for making these videos available.)
  • Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a biology course
  • Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a chemistry course

Evidence from the Interviews

Notes from a Decoding intrerview

The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided further indications of the impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

• Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effectively compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
  • Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course

Spreading What Has Been Learned

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project has not been limited to the teachers who participated directly in the program as fellows. As is clearly visible in the videos above from the Decoding webinar and the FALCON conference, the teachers participating in the program are actively involved in sharing what they have learned. In the three years following the first year of the project, the fellows have published several articles and have made presentations in venues ranging from departmental meetings to international conferences -- all based on their experiences in this program. And on the Indiana University Bloomington campus and in multiple high schools across the state, veterans of the program have spontaneously created local faculty learning communities in which they are sharing the Decoding process and conducting Decoding interviews with their colleagues.

More information about the Program

The initial Decoding Transitions to College Project was directed by David Pace and Rebecca Itow and received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.

A fuller description of this program may be found in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines (Special issue of Die Hochschullehre (2025).

More information about Decoding the Disciplines may be found elsewhere on this Wiki and on the Decoding website at https://decoding.webflow.io/.