Learning in the disciplines: a conceptual framework

Learning in the Disciplines emphasizes that the goals of schooling need to prepare individuals to meet the demands of 21st century society. However, current educational approaches are not doing so. Rather, what learners learn and how they come to learn it need to reflect discipline-specific practices as well as content. This essay presents a conceptual framework for characterizing the knowledge and practices disciplinary experts rely on when they reason, argue, and generate new knowledge within their disciplinary communities (Goldman et al., 2016). The framework offers a basis for generating instructional goals and designing instruction that supports learners' developing discipline-specific critical reading, reasoning, and argumentation competencies to meet 21st century demands.