David Pace

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of History

One of the most effective ways to increase student learning is to identify places where students have difficulty and then show them precisely what they need to do to get past this bottleneck. This, however, requires making these steps explicit, both to ourselves and to our students. The Decoding the Disciplines process provides an effective means f...

Decoding the Disciplines has emerged as one of the foremost approaches to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and is being used to increase learning across the globe. But it is often not recognized that the paradigm has undergone enormous changes since its appearance in 2004. The original model has been clarified and perfected, but scho...

A Post from "Decoding the Ivory Tower" http://decodingtheivorytower.net/ David Pace [For some time two concerns have hovered in the back of my consciousness: the total inability of contemporary culture to generate visions of a positive future and the absence of any practical plan within the community of scholars of teaching and learning to actually...

An exploration of strategies through which college classes can become more effective pathways to learning for a much broader spectrum of students.

In an age of political and institutional crisis we must use the scholarship of teaching and learning to maximize learning in order to minimize inequality and maximize effective citizenship.

Teaching and learning in a college setting has never been more challenging. How can instructors reach out to their students and fully engage them in the conversation? Applicable to multiple disciplines, the Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm offers a radically new model for helping students respond to the challenges of college and provides a framewo...

The Tuning Movement and the scholarship of teaching and learning have each had a significant impact on teaching history in higher education in the United States. But the isolation of these initiatives from each other has lessened their potential impact. Interactions between the two might bring together the intellectual exploration of scholarship of...

Two of the panelists, Ann Katherine Isaacs (Tuning EU) and Fernando Purcell (Tuning Amrica Latina), will discuss how History Tuning projects in their regions of the world serve as points of comparison and contrast with the work their U.S. colleagues have pursued. Kathy and Fernando will focus their discussions around six key topics: (1) how they...

The understandings and preconceptions students bring into the history classroom can interfere with student learning. Analyses of student and professor interviews in light of emotional bottlenecks revealed two different, though related, student preconceptions: procedural preconceptions about history as a field of study and pre-existing worldviews th...

Relates the results of a 2006 study sponsored by Indiana University's History Learning Project, which examines why some students in undergraduate history courses understand the material and are able to do well, while others do not. The initial aim was to discern how professors could teach history better, but in the process, the authors discovered t...

Students' difficulty in mastering material can motivate faculty toward the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) if instructors' frustration can be framed as a researchable question, and they have practical models for assessing learning outcomes. The “decoding the disciplines” approach supports this shift from reflective teaching to SoTL. By...

Over the past decade historians and educational researchers in the UK, Australia, the USA and Canada have been devoting ever increasing energy to the systematic exploration of the learning of history at the college level. Now members of the discipline have come together to nurture and to disseminate this new scholarship of teaching and learning his...

To think like a historian, students must select and assess evidence that supports interpretations of the meaning of the past. Three historians focus on aspects of this task and pursue different approaches to teach their students to use evidence.

Using the Decoding the Disciplines model, faculty who are deeply ingrained in their disciplinary research answer a series of questions to understand how students think and learn in their field. The cross-disciplinary nature of the process clarifies the thinking for each discipline.

In most disciplines, professors ask students to “read” without specifying what this operation means for their particular field. This chapter traces the path laid out in a cultural history class, where reading entails identifying the essential elements of a text.

This chapter addresses the logistical considerations for the use of collaborative learning in the Decoding the Disciplines model and presents twelve principles for successfully using teamwork in the classroom and several assessments of the efficacy of the group process.

This chapter presents a vision in which the kinds of thinking and learning that are commonly required of students become a regular part of the teaching and scholarship within every discipline.

Those who teach subjects that explore controversial issues often find that students have difficulty thinking about and responding productively to them. College instructors have leeway in structuring learning in ways that maximize the possibility of productive critical thinking. By shaping classroom experiences before the controversial material is e...

Evidence has been accumulating for over a decade that approaches such as collaborative and active learning, have potential for creating real increases in student learning. Yet on many campuses these ideas are having little impact on what is actually happening in classes and in the formation of institutional practices. What are the cultural obstacle...

Despite their insistence that the development of atomic energy was a revolutionary event that transformed history, French intellectuals in the 1940s immediately placed it within the context of the ideological struggles of the early Third Republic. For the Catholic right, the destructiveness of the new weapon demonstrated the bankruptcy of science a...