Experiences of academic staff in using threshold concepts within a reformed curriculum

Integrating threshold concepts with reflective practice: Discussing a theory‐based approach for curriculum refinement in dental education

“…Ideally, the operationalisation of TCs should involve all stakeholders, and when done at the curriculum level, there is a need for student involvement, staff buy‐in and participation, support from leadership and institutional engagement to dedicate sufficient workload allocation to this area in the short term. Some examples of TCs within health have included care, and pain in medicine, professional socialisation and identity in dentistry and occupational therapy, client‐centred practice and integrated reasoning also in occupational therapy and argument and theorising in research education . Within a given discipline cohort, not all students will find the same TC difficult, however, and the very nature of a TC means that there is no specific transition point or single hurdle to be passed ensuring that a student has crossed a set threshold.…”

“…Identifying a TC involves deconstructing a subject or discipline area, and in the process, reflecting on the best way to teach it and for students to learn it . When used to reform an occupational therapy curriculum, for example, Rodger et al reported multiple benefits for both students and staff, including the use of a meaningful shared language, coherent integration of concepts within the curricula, and a more consistent staff approach to teaching and facilitating the development of students’ professional identities.…”

“…One of the key arguments for introducing TCs into health professional education, and dental education in particular, is the difficulty in closing the theory‐practice gap and occasioning a shift in the learners’ identity . By focusing more specifically on difficult to learn areas, where an integrated understanding of subject matter is crucial to moving forward, the liminal spaces between theory and practice can be made more overt, especially with reflective tasks that promote learner engagement with material and tasks, and assessment methods which promote integration of subject matter with competencies, thus making the links between experiential clinic learning and the didactic conceptual learning in lectures more explicit .…”

“…This approach is not a linear process and reflective tasks are important for students to gain the ability to develop a metacognitive understanding of what it is they do and do not understand, to be able to articulate their concerns and to gradually realise at a certain point that they have actually crossed the threshold and developed an irreversible understanding of a concept . Engagement with threshold concepts can also assist staff to develop authentic assessment tasks which reinforce professional identity in the pre‐clinical years, becoming learning activities in themselves …”

Deconstruction of prior knowledge and visual narratives in Computing pedagogy

“…We asked the students questions about their concepts around certain topics, academic interests, and assessment preferences. The importance of addressing these areas of prior knowledge has been discussed in the educational literature including Rodger et al (2015) and Kahu et al (2015).…”