Threshold concepts: how can we recognise them?

Abstract

Successful undergraduates acquire ‘ways of thinking and practising in a subject’ (McCune and Hounsell, 2005). They are inducted into ways of understanding the world that are shared by a community of scholars. The idea that undergraduate teaching introduces students to a ‘way of thinking’ is often cited. For example, many introductory Economics courses include the following quotation from Keynes (1973, p. 856): ‘The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.’