Threshold knowledge is a term in the study of
higher education
Tertiary education (higher education, or post-secondary education) is the educational level following the completion of secondary education.
The World Bank defines tertiary education as including universities, colleges, and vocational schools ...
used to describe core concepts—or threshold concepts—which, once understood, transform
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
of a given subject, phenomenon, or experience.
[Meyer J H F and Land R 2003 "Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising" in ''Improving Student Learning: Ten Years On''. C. Rust (Ed), OCSLD, Oxford.]
The term was introduced by Jan Meyer and Ray Land,
[Meyer JHF, Land R (2005). "Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning" ''Higher Education'', 49(3), 373-388.][Land, R., Cousin, G., Meyer, J.H.F. and Davies, P. (2005), "Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation", in C. Rust (ed.), ''Improving Student Learning − equality and diversity, Proceedings of the 12th Improving Student Learning Conference''. Oxford: OCLSD.] Meyer and Land also discuss the related idea of troublesome knowledge, ideas that appear alien or counter-intuitive.[ The theory holds that:
These ideas have been explored by several subsequent researchers in a variety of disciplinary contexts including:
* International theory][Korosteleva, E. A. (2010) Threshold Concept Through Enactive Learnings: How Effective Are They in the Study of European Politics?, International Studies Perspectives, 11, 37-50.]
* Science education
*Economics
Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...
* Healthcare education
* Miscellaneous
* Statistics
Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...
* Information literacy
The Association of College and Research Libraries defines information literacy as a "set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued and the use of infor ...
*Writing studies
The theory has also been criticised.
The notion of threshold concept is related to the notion of bottleneck in the Decoding the Disciplines framework. It can be considered a special case of the latter.[Shopkow, L (2010). "What decoding the disciplines can offer threshold concepts." Threshold concepts and transformational learning, 317-331. Leiden:Brill.]
See also
* Eureka effect
* Decoding the Disciplines
*Paradigm shift
A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. It is a concept in the philosophy of science that was introduced and brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist a ...
* Tacit knowledge
* Propaedeutics
References
External links
Threshold Concepts: Undergraduate Teaching, Postgraduate Training, Professional Development and School Education — A Short Introduction and a Bibliography fom 2003 to 2018
maintained by Mick Flanagan from UCL
ETL Project Occasional Report on threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, by Meyer and Land
{dead, date=March 2024
archived
Higher education