THRESHOLD CONCEPTS AND
PRACTITIONER RESEARCH
CAN STUMBLING BLOCKS IN
LEARNING LEAD TO BUILDING
BLOCKS IN TEACHING?
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
LOEX FALL FOCUS ON THE FRAMEWORK
NOVEMBER 14, 2015
Sharon Mader
Dean Emeritus, University of New Orleans Library
Visiting Program Officer for Information Literacy,
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)
SESSION OUTCOMES
• Describe how stumbling blocks in student learning can be identified through
threshold concept research
• Choose relevant methodologies that can used to design practitioner research
projects concerning threshold concepts and student learning
• List key implications of threshold concept research for teaching & learning
Framework for information literacy
for higher education
Metaliteracy
Understanding by Design
Threshold Concepts
Metaliteracy (Mackey & Jacobson)
Students as creators as
well as consumers
Behavioral
Affective
Cognitive
Metacognitive
Reflection
Wiggins and McTighe
Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005).
Understanding by Design (2nd ed).
New York, NY: Pearson.
Threshold Concept
Characteristics
Transformative
Irreversible
Integrative
Bounded
Troublesome
Finding the stuck places
“Broadly, the purpose of threshold concept
research is to explore difficulties in the learning
and teaching of subjects to support the
curriculum design process.”
G. Cousin, Transactional Curriculum Inquiry
What is the gap between what we
teach and what students learn?
Librarians and Research
“How Much of Library and Information
Science Literature Qualifies as Research?”
Turcios, Agarwal, & Watkins
205 journal titles analyzed
1880 articles
16 % of those qualified as research
Surveys were the most popular research method
Qualitative Research
 Investigates the why and how, not just what, where,
when, or who…
Practitioner Research
“Practitioner researchers are educators
who conduct research on their own
practice, and, based upon their own
research as well as that of others, learn to
recognize and enact needed changes in
their practice.”
National Louis University Center for Practitioner
Research
Threshold concept research
to improve student learning
to dynamically connect research and teaching.
The Framework aligns us with the larger
teaching and learning movements in higher
education
SoTL: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Signature Pedagogies
Decoding the Disciplines
SoTL: The scholarship of teaching and learning:
“…by which faculty continuously
evaluate the quality of their
teaching and its effect on student
learning…”
Gurung, Chick, & Haynie, Exploring Signature Pedagogies (2009)
Exploring Signature Pedagogies in the
Disciplines
The habits of mind that distinguish the discipline,
the traditional or generic ways of teaching in the
disciplines, what they teach students about the
discipline, and articulating a signature
pedagogy that teaches students the distinctive
practices and values of that discipline.”
“
Gurung, Chick, and Haynie (2009)
Elements of a Signature Pedagogy
Habits of the mind (content)
Habits of the hand (skills)
Habits of the heart (values)
Proposal:
Let’s use the Frames as a basis for exploring the
stumbling blocks to learning
What is new & compelling with the
Framework?
 Takes librarians to the heart of teaching and learning
 Creates a common conversation
 Focuses on conceptual understandings & essential
questions
 Uncovers the ‘stuck places’
 Includes affective and self-reflective dimensions
 Recognizes students as creators not just consumers
 Reflects the way research is really done
 Lives – and thrives - in the local context
Creates a common conversation
What do we share
with teaching faculty?
Librarians as educators
The power of conversation
Engaging students, faculty, and librarians in
interactive and reflective dialogue
Threshold concept research
Transactional curriculum inquiry
1. What do academics consider to be fundamental to a
grasp of their subject?
2. What do students find difficult to grasp?
3. What curriculum design interventions can support
mastery of these difficulties?
Cousin, G. (2009). Researching Learning in Higher Education. New York:
Routledge.
Examples of practitioner research
My pilot study: Exploring threshold
concepts as portals to doctoral
student success
Purpose:
To explore challenges or threshold concepts
that students face in the development of
the knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes
that characterize successful doctoral
students in a discipline.
Vitae Researcher Development Framework
Survey
Three-part Survey
Which domains present the greatest challenges for your
graduate students in their development as successful
doctoral candidates and researchers?
Which domains are the most important in the
development of successful doctoral students?
What is the current level of development for your
doctoral students of knowledge, behaviors, and
attitudes related to scholarly communications concepts
and practices?
Rachel Scott, University of Memphis
“If We Frame It, They Will Respond:
Undergraduate Student Responses to the
Framework for IL for Higher Education”
 Who was involved
 First semester Honors Program students (n=16)
 Purpose
 How do incoming freshmen respond to the language and concepts
of the Framework?
 How do the language and concepts used in the frames fit in with
undergraduates’ existing understanding of research practices?
 Method
 Pre-test with two open-ended questions for each FW frame
 Post-test at end of semester
Rachel Scott
 “These findings contribute to the literature by making
explicit undergraduate students’ understanding of the
Framework and how the frames relate to their conception
of research practices.”
 “By providing the students’ data, the current study
provides insight into the specific words and concepts with
which students struggled as well as the concepts with
which they more readily engaged.”
 “…students can, even upon first impression, begin to
make sense of the complexity to which the Framework
alludes.”
Rachel Scott
 Post-test at the end of the semester will allow a
comparison to gauge changes in the students’
responses to the language of the Framework as an
indicator of growth in understanding
 Her personal inclination is “to give students credit for
their ability to make meaning of complex concepts and
to learn from how they match the language and
concepts of the Framework with their existing frame of
reference” – while recognizing that other librarians might
identify a need to translate the language and concepts
for their constituency.
Paula Dempsey, U. of Illinois-Chicago
Heather Jagman, DePaul University, Chicago
“I felt like such a freshman”: First-year students crossing
the library threshold”
Participants
First-year students in the required Freshman Seminar (n=97)
Purpose
To illuminate students’ early steps on the path to engaging
in academic life and becoming information literate
Dempsey & Jagman
Methodology
 A library experience
Think of a book or movie of interest to you and look it up in
the DePaul Library online catalog.
Go to the campus library and check it out
Reflect on the process in 1-2 pages (8 open-ended questions)
 Followed by reflective essay
(written for their peer mentors)
 Qualitative analysis of 97 essays using NVivo
software to code and analyze narratives
Too simple? Not for a novice
“Honestly, I was scared to go into the library because I felt like
such a freshman. I had no idea of how it worked”
Findings
 Students articulated troublesome concepts that
resonate with knowledge practices and dispositions from
the ACRL Framework
 There is no way to predict which concepts students
have incorporated into their thinking about using
information.
 The novice perspective in these essays lend empirical
weight to studies of how experts perceive stumbling
blocks.
 This study demonstrates that knowledge practices and
dispositions identified by librarians appear in student
narratives of basic encounters with academic libraries.
Allows experts to hear directly from novices about
troublesome concepts.
Margy MacMillan
Mt. Royal University, Calgary, Canada
“Fostering the Integration of Information
Literacy and Journalism Practice: A Longterm Study of Journalism Students”
Audience
 Journalism students (n=215+
Purpose
 To prompt students to reflect on and articulate information literacy skills and
understandings and their development over time for academic, professional, and
personal use.
Margy Macmillan
Methodology and Results
Instrument: I-Skills Resume (Information Skills and Knowledge for Lifelong
Learning Success)
Student-reported data-they completed the resume the fall semester of their
first year and updated it every subsequent fall.
Results were coded for instances of various IL skills and development of skills
over time. (Coded by hand; now she uses NVivo qualitative analysis software.)
Margy MacMillan
 “The long-term nature of the study provides evidence of students
developing their understanding of threshold concepts in IL and
internalizing those concepts into their practice.”
 She states that “some resumes explicitly describe the transfer of skills
between information ecosystems” (personal, academic,
professional)
 The resulting thematic analysis led to a restructuring of IL instruction
to align with professional needs and practices of their discipline.
Mira Peter & Ann Harlow, University of Waikato, NZ
“Threshold Concepts: Impacts on Teaching and
Learning at Tertiary Level”
Participants
 Two educational researcher facilitators and five practitioner researchers and 190
students enrolled in each course
Purpose
 This project explored teaching and learning of hard-to-learn threshold concepts
in first-year English, an electrical engineering course, a leadership course and in
doctoral writing and identifying changes in students’ understanding of threshold
concepts and perceptions of threshold concept-centered teaching
Methodology
 Facilitated collaborative action research project
 Included interviews with each lecturer at beginning and end of semester and group
discussions; interviews and focus groups with students
University of Waikato: What value is there for
tertiary curriculum and pedagogy design when
lecturers from several disciplines collaborate to
undertake action research?
 “Through deconstructing their curricula and reflecting on this together,
lecturers felt that they experienced a phase transition in their own
understanding about teaching threshold concepts.
 Lecturers’ main realization was that trans-disciplinary investigation of threshold
concepts could provide a fertile context within which lecturers can alter their
understanding of their own discipline, their teaching, and their students’
learning.”
 “In all cases, cross-disciplinary discussions helped lecturers consolidate their
understanding of threshold concepts and where they fitted into their
curricula, and it helped them develop new ways to re-design their courses
and pedagogy to make threshold concepts explicit to students.”
David Hay, Ian Kinchin, Simon Lygo-Baker
“Making Learning Visible: The Role of
Concept Mapping in Higher Education”
 Use to transform abstract knowledge and understanding into concrete
visual representations that are amenable to comparison and
measurement
 Use to identify prior knowledge and involve students in new knowledge
construction
 Use to compare students’ knowledge structures before & after
teaching
 Allows instructors to identify the new concepts that students find
troublesome or difficult to acquire
 Use to promote ‘meaningful learning’ and the gradual emergence of
‘expert’ status
“What Decoding the Disciplines Can Offer
Threshold Concepts”
Leah Shopkow, Indiana University
The Decoding the Disciplines Process
1. What is a bottleneck to learning in this class?
2. How does an expert do these things?
3. How can these tasks be explicitly modeled?
4. How will students practice these skills and get feedback?
5. What will motivate the students?
6. How well are students mastering these learning tasks?
7. How can the resulting knowledge about learning be shared?
Conversations about Learnig
Participatory methodology
 Gives very rich data
 Results in deep reflections on pedagogic practice and leads to
rethinking and retooling
 Can use the data to generate further discussion and reflection – among
faculty/librarians, and with students
 Can highlight a disjuncture or disconnect between pedagogic
intentions of the faculty/librarians and the learning experience as
experienced by the students
 Interviews, generally semi-structured
 Student narratives or reflections (student voice data)
 Focus groups
 Concept mapping
What can we learn from these studies?
Rachel Scott
 Small scale – one section of a required first-year (Honors) course
 Explicitly engaging the students with the frames
 Charting change in language to reflect evolution of understanding over time
 “Involving students in an investigation of the frames comprising the Framework
present a unique opportunity for practitioners to learn alongside students and
better connect with their understanding of research processes.”
Paula Dempsey & Heather Jagman
 First-year seminar
 Qualitative analysis through coding to reveal patterns in narratives, which
mirrored the threshold concepts of the Frames (NVivo software)
 “Immersing ourselves in these essays had made us see students differently: more
vulnerable, more intellectually invested, and hungrier for authentic learning.”
Research study lessons
Margy MacMillan
 Situated in a discipline - journalism
 The value of a longitudinal study
 Student reflections encompassed in the expanded definition of IL in
the Framework
 Coding and thematic analysis
 Transfer of skills and knowledge across academic, professional and
personal dimensions
 “The long-term nature of the study also provides evidence of
students developing their understanding of threshold concepts in IL
and internalizing those concepts in their practice.”
More lessons learned
Mira Peter & Ann Harlow
 Facilitated practitioner research (transdisciplinary
dialogue)
 Student-voice data leads to awareness of challenges
students face in mastering threshold concepts
 Phase transitions (for students and for faculty)
 “…collaboration among lecturers, within and between
faculties, and between lecturers and students, is closely
linked to classroom revisions and changes that affect, and
improve, the student learning process.”
K.M. Quinlan, S. Male, C. Baillie, A. Stamboulis, J.
Fill, Z. Jaffer________________________________
“Methodological Challenges in Researching
Threshold Concepts: A Comparative Analysis of
Three Projects”
 “One of the strengths of the notion of threshold concepts is its
effectiveness in engaging academics in discipline-specific conversations
about teaching.”
 Entering the second decade of researching threshold concepts…
 Bring together pedagogical researchers to compare and contrast
methods to develop clearer and more explicit methods
 Linking threshold concepts theory with generic, discipline-context-free
learning theories like transformative learning or student development
theory to look at difficult transitions and stages of development and
contextualize or translate into particular disciplines.
“Teaching for Transfer: Reconciling the
Framework with Disciplinary Information
Literacy”
Rebecca Kuglitsch
 “If our aim is to teach students the generalized skills of information literacy,
educational research suggests that the best way to do so is to explicitly
situate those generalized skills of the Framework in a domain familiar to
students.”
 Students can then actively bridge these two spheres of expertise
 And this provides them the opportunity to explicitly and reflectively transfer
skills to other disciplines and contexts.
 Points to similarities between composition/writing studies and IL:
generalizable skills and expertise with concepts that span disciplines and
facilitate transfer of learning
The IL Framework & WPA Outcomes
Statement:
Separated at birth?
 Michael Moghtader, Information
Literacy: A New Organizing Principle
for the First-Year College Writing
Course
 Barbara D’Angelo and Barry Maid,
The IL Framework and WPA OS:
Threshold Concepts and
Metaliteracy
Georgia International Information
Literacy Conference, September 2015
ACRL Framework Advisory Board (FAB)
Webinar Series
 Webinar 1: January 5, 2016
 Creating Collaborations
through Connecting National
Writing Guidelines to the ACRL
Framework for Information
Literacy
 Webinars 2 & 3 to follow,
 Writing/composition faculty
and librarian pairs talk about
their collaborations
early spring, 2016
www.internetmonk.com
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learning in the classroom, in the
curriculum, and in the institution
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