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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 FRAMEWORKNOVEMBER 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 FrameworkSurvey
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-ChicagoHeather 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 MacMillanMt. Royal University, Calgary, Canada“Fostering the Integration of Information Literacy and Journalism Practice: A Long-term 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 UniversityThe 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 LearnigParticipatory 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
Methods of analysis
Facilitated practitioner research
Coding
Grounded theory
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
Webinars 2 & 3 to follow,
early spring, 2016
Creating Collaborations through Connecting National Writing Guidelines to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy
Writing/composition faculty and librarian pairs talk about their collaborations
Takes librarians to the heart of student learning in the classroom, in the curriculum, and in the institution
ConversationContextContentCollaborationCommitment
