Threshold concepts in learning biology and evolution

Students in higher education often have misconceptions (which may have arisen prior to and/or because of formal instruction) that affect their academic progress. A theoretical framework entitled “threshold concepts” (Meyer and Land 2003, 2005) may provide academics with a powerful heuristic to help more students to pass through previously troublesome and inaccessible conceptual gateways. Meyer and Land (2005) describe “threshold concepts” as seminal ideas within a discipline that, once grasped, make the learner feel they are ‘crossing through a portal’. These are transformative, irreversible and integrative experiences typified by cognitive and ontological shifts within students’ minds, often accompanied by an extension of students’ scientific language. Although any one individual concept is not necessarily troublesome to all students, within any one discipline, there may be some pieces of fundamental, tacit knowledge which have become “assumed understanding” and thus ritualised by students and teachers. “Threshold concepts” may also have extrinsic properties - what is a threshold for one student, may not be a threshold for another. In this Australian Learning and Teaching Council-funded study, empirical evidence from students at three major universities, with differing cultures and student characteristics, and from academics (in Australia and overseas) was used to identify a web of potential “threshold concepts” in Biology, which include the topics of ‘evolution’ and ‘equilibrium’. It may be that once students cross a threshold and have a deeper understanding of some seminal concepts, they can transfer this way of thinking to aid in crossing thresholds in other contexts when encountering difficult concepts.