Imagine a chef at a trendy restaurant who doesn’t know how to make mayonnaise, or a pastry chef who works in a bakery and has never made a basic cake: do you think it’s possible?

At university, students begin a path of specialization that requires a much more detailed study of academic subjects and disciplines. Each of these subjects has its own basic ingredients and techniques: those foundational knowledge or concepts without which it is impossible to continue learning.

These basic concepts are known in the academic field as “threshold concepts”, precisely because they mark the entrance to that specialized world of the discipline, and are what allows or does not allow us to access it.

The difficult transition and dropping out of university

With a 20.17% dropout rate at Spanish public universities, especially in the first years, it is worth asking how many of these students leave because they do not fully understand their first forays into specialized subjects.

When we investigate how to improve this situation, which has a considerable impact on the efficiency of public spending, with unrecoverable costs for families and psychological repercussions on the students themselves, we must focus on the review of the first years and the transition from high school to university.

One of the possible revisions of the training curricula is the search and identification of threshold concepts .

Internalize a discipline

Threshold concepts invite us to internalize a discipline, whatever it may be, and to enter into it without the possibility of turning back. They push us to ask even more questions, to investigate independently, to organize the set of its notions.

Do we know what threshold concepts are in each discipline? Not always, although they exist and we have given them other names. They could be historical thought in history, opportunity cost in economics or density in physics. But threshold concepts are dynamic, variable, and even reversible: who would have thought a few years ago that hybridization between Neanderthals and sapiens would change the concept of human evolution?

The student, protagonist

The appropriate teaching strategy must be aimed at identifying threshold concepts from the initial courses, to their assimilation and improvement as the student progresses in his or her university education. To this end, as established by the recommendations of the European Higher Education Area , the student becomes the dynamic centre of the teaching-learning process, and must therefore learn to learn during his or her time at university.

A permanent search

The fluidity of threshold concepts is, precisely, their strength: investigating with students what they might be and identifying them in each subject transforms the experience of the first years of the degree.

The teacher becomes a Joseph Bell for Conan Doyle: the professor from the University of Edinburgh served as a reference for building Sherlock Holmes. In the same way, teachers encourage the young detectives who are their students to approach the mystery of knowledge in a dynamic way: participating in the discovery of which concepts are key to asking more questions, to know at the same time the core of the subject that is proposed to them, and the various paths that it opens to other content.

And the teacher, like Watson with Holmes, becomes his guide, sometimes his chronicler, a mirror that helps him polish his reasoning until he reaches his own eureka. Elementary, beloved threshold concept.

Participatory methodologies

Threshold concepts must be combined with the use of active teaching methodologies in the classroom, with voluntary participation by students and with an evaluation of the subject that incorporates the appropriate criteria for encouraging participation. Without a doubt, this voluntary participation is essential and students must see it reflected both in the learning of the subject and in the grade for the subject.

A combination of active teaching methodologies that address diverse learning styles is the best recommendation . Among them, one that works especially well with the search for threshold concepts is flipped learning, in which students define which concepts meet those characteristics that we understand make them “threshold” or entry to knowledge of the subject, create their own educational content and become teachers for the rest of their classmates.

Other possibilities are transmedia narratives, in which the user becomes a creator of shared digital content, and not a mere passive recipient of immutable knowledge; or cooperative work, where group participation and collective intelligence, with its milestones of co-evaluation and self-evaluation, allows us to overcome simple individual analysis. This is exactly what the current digital generations teach us in their daily lives: the endless potential of becoming a creator of knowledge, and sharing it.

The threshold concept therefore opens up this path of transformation in the first years of higher education with very promising potential. Teaching to learn for teachers and learning to learn for students is the success inherent to the threshold concepts and the transition to the university classroom.

Author Bios: Jose Luis Quevedo Garcia is Associate lecturer, Federico E. González Ramírez is Assistant Professor and Rachel Espino Espino is Professor of the Department of Applied Economic Analysis all at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria