Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge

by Jan Meyer, Ray Land

It has long been a matter of concern to teachers in higher education why certain students ‘get stuck’ at particular points in the curriculum whilst others grasp concepts with comparative ease. What accounts for this variation in student performance and, more importantly, how can teachers change their teaching and courses to help students overcome such barriers? This book examines the difficulties of student learning and offers advice on how to overcome them through course design, assessment practice and teaching methods. It also provides innovative case material from a wide range of institutions and disciplines, including the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences and economics.

Genres: Teaching

238 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2006

Reviews

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 'university' eye view of the same phenomenon that we call 'standards' or 'big ideas' and the role they serve in actually learning something that sticks and is useful! The thing I loved about this book was the division of big ideas or threshold concepts and their difficulty into 'troublesome knowledge' into categories which are explored of Ritual knowledge, Inert knowledge, conceptually difficult knowledge, alien knowledge, complex & paradoxical knowledge and tacit knowledge.

This was immediately useful working with a team who were looking at Knowledge that it was hard to do without (like plate - tectonics or the solar system arrangement of planets) and yet it seemed to just tell you how things got to how they were, without adding much else. Bingo - an 'inert threshold concept' - essential to know to take part in discourse as a 'modern' human, but actually hard to do anything with in the classroom immediately afterwards. Naming the difficult one would have to find benchmarks for the knowledge, made things fall into place.

Some of the work on University level thinking about pedagogy revealed a great many places where actually school based research could be really useful for the authors, and they seemed unaware of a lot of literature covering similar ground, at times more rigorously.

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisitely thorough and thoughtful

Highly recommended for any graduate students studying the complex landscape of threshold concepts. Whilst heavily influenced by economic scholarship, the initial and concluding chapters are an excellent primer for those embarking on their threshold investigative journeys. Specifically thought provoking, were the chapters in analogy and problem based learning for those interested in constructivist learning theory. Give it a read and immerse yourself in the quixotic paredolia of threshold concepts.

[Chris Friend · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear and informative introduction to the idea of threshold concepts. Seems more intent on defining/explaining than on theorizing. With this text, readers will know well what a threshold concept is and will understand how they work within a curriculum or discipline, but I don't think a reader can glean how to think about, negotiate, or manage threshold concepts. This book is a good first start, but more work needs to be done.