Decoding Tuning

Over the past decade the Indiana University History Learning Project has been systematically applying the Decoding the Discipline model to issues of learning college history. Decoding begins with the assumption that college students encounter difficulties when the tasks that they must complete require a mastery of crucial mental operations that have not been taught.  These ways of operating in a discipline are so automatic to practitioners in the field that they have become invisible.  Therefore, it is necessary to systematically unearth the basic steps that are necessary to conduct work in the discipline and to explicitly teach each of these steps to students.

   The History Learning Project has explored these issues through intensive interviews with historians. In the process common bottlenecks to learning in history courses have been identified and the mental operations needed to overcome these obstacles have been made explicit.  And this group has experimented with a variety of strategies for teaching these ways of operating to students, giving them practice, and assessing the learning which occurs.