  Education is increasingly being framed by a competence mindset; the value of
knowledge lies much more in competence performativity and innovation than in
simply knowing. Reaching such competency in areas such as astronomy and physics
has long been known to be challenging. The movement from everyday conceptions
of the world around us to a disciplinary interpretation is fraught with
pitfalls and problems. Thus, what underpins the characteristics of the
disciplinary trajectory to competence becomes an important educational
consideration. In this article we report on a study involving what students and
lecturers discern from the same disciplinary semiotic resource. We use this to
propose an Anatomy of Disciplinary Discernment (ADD), a hierarchy of what is
focused on and how it is interpreted in an appropriate, disciplinary manner, as
an overarching fundamental aspect of disciplinary learning. Students and
lecturers in astronomy and physics were asked to describe what they could
discern from a video simulation of travel through our Galaxy and beyond. 137
people from nine countries participated. The descriptions were analysed using a
hermeneutic interpretive study approach. The analysis resulted in the
formulation of five qualitatively different categories of discernment; the ADD,
reflecting a view of participants' competence levels. The ADD reveals four
increasing levels of disciplinary discernment: Identification, Explanation,
Appreciation, and Evaluation. This facilitates the identification of a clear
relationship between educational level and the level of disciplinary
discernment. The analytical outcomes of the study suggest how teachers of
science, after using the ADD to assess the students disciplinary knowledge, may
attain new insights into how to create more effective learning environments by
explicitly crafting their teaching to support the crossing of boundaries in the
ADD model.
