THRESHOLD CONCEPTS – A NEW APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE WAY WE THINK AND PRACTICE IN THE GEOSCIENCES?

It is well recognised by teachers of geoscience that students tend to find some geological concepts more difficult to grasp than others. It is also apparent that our curricula are become increasingly ‘stuffed' as advances in geoscience reveal new and ever-changing concepts that are ‘vital' to our understanding of the Earth. So how do we decide what our students ‘need to know' in order to become geoscientists, and to what extent is this dictated by the fact that teachers often spend a lot of time and effort trying to help their students acquire concepts that they simply ‘do not get'?

This poster introduces the idea of ‘threshold concepts' as a means to better understand student learning and, hence, to develop an enhanced curriculum to facilitate that learning. The debate surrounding threshold concepts is relatively recent and has mainly been focused within other disciplines such as economics, maths and history. Following on from their contributions to a conference in the UK on threshold concepts in geography, earth and environmental sciences, and in preparation for the 2nd International Threshold Concepts Symposium in 2008, the authors are seeking to open the debate more widely to the geoscience community and thereby begin to develop an understanding of what this new approach to learning means for our subject area.