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 turned 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 colleges 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 is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience 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 fromboth 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 clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in 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 20215 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)
• "Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry. (In addition to the video of the full session, below are the sections of the the presentation in which two of the Decoding Transitions Fellows provided details about how their experience in the program led to specific changes in their teaching strategies
  • Biology

Evidence from the Interviews

The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of 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 highschool/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 effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
  • Comparing Graphs in a College Biology Course

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading  these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

For More Information

A fuller description of this program maybe 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).

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