Threshold Concepts
What are Threshold Concepts?
Threshold concepts have been described as a transformative gateway, because they lead to understanding new and conceptually difficult ideas and allow students to progress from simple recall to the formation of a complex web of knowledge.
Threshold concepts are understood to possess the following characteristics: they are
- Transformative - once acquired it shifts perception of the subject
- Irreversible - once learners have come to see the world in terms of the threshold concept they cannot return to their former, more primitive, view
- Integrative - acquisition of the threshold concept illuminates the underlying inter-relatedness of aspects of the subject
- Bounded - the threshold concept helps to demarcate subject boundaries
- Troublesome - a threshold concept may be counterintuitive and initially very difficult for learners to accept. In grasping a threshold concept the learner moves to a new perception of the world that may be in conflict with previously held perceptions.
Learn more from presentations by the experts!
From Associate Professor Pauline Ross, UWS
- Threshold Concepts defined
- The importance of Language and Biology as a threshold concept
- Thresholds Workshop for teachers
- Designing an intervention to teach cells to Stage 4 students
From Associate Professor Roy Tasker, UWS
- A Cognitive Learning Model
- Notes for "A Cogntive Learning Model"
- Slides for "A Cognitive Learning Model" - added soon!
- A Learning Design Flow Chart for Chemistry
- "A Scientific Approach to the Teaching of Chemistry" by Norman Reid published in Chem. Educ. Pract. 2008, 9, 51 - 59. © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2008
From Dr Charlotte Taylor, Sydney University
- Threshold Concepts and Hypotheses
