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 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.
A fuller description of this program is 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 program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has 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.
