Ideas that change how you see a subject

In one line: some ideas change how people see a whole subject once they get them, and learners often get stuck for a while on the way. That can be a normal stage, not a failure.

What they did

This isn’t an experiment. It’s a proposal: a new way of thinking about why some ideas are so hard to learn.

Jan Meyer and Ray Land were working on a large UK project on university teaching in the early 2000s. In conversations with university teachers, especially economics lecturers, the same thing kept coming up. Certain ideas held students up far more than others. Some students came through them seeing the whole subject differently. Others stayed stuck. Meyer and Land wrote this paper in 2003 to describe these ideas and give them a name: threshold concepts.

What they found

• Some ideas are doorways. Meyer and Land said a threshold concept is usually transformative (it changes how you see the subject), irreversible (hard to un-know), integrative (it links up things that seemed separate) and often troublesome (it goes against common sense, or feels strange). They added that it may also mark out the edges of a subject area.
• There’s a stuck stage in between. Before people get through, they may swing back and forth, feel confused, or copy the right words without the meaning. Meyer and Land called this the liminal (in-between) stage. They suggested that rushing people past it may leave them only copying, not really understanding.
• Hard ideas are hard in different ways. They borrowed five kinds of “troublesome knowledge” from David Perkins (1999): learned by rote with no meaning; known but never used; hard to grasp; strange, because it clashes with what you believe; and unspoken, known by experts but rarely said out loud.
• Experts can forget the doorway. Once through, it can be hard to remember not seeing it. Meyer and Land suggested this may explain some unhelpful teaching: the expert presents the idea as obvious.

How much should you trust it?

A useful way of thinking, built on teachers’ judgement; little testing of what helps.

• It’s a proposal based on what teachers noticed, not on a study that measured anything.
• There is no reliable test for whether an idea is a threshold concept or just hard. It comes down to experts’ judgement, and experts in the same field can disagree.
• The idea has led to a lot of writing, but little research on which teaching moves actually help people get through.
• It came from university teaching. Healthcare teachers have taken it up, but it has been much less tested in workplaces.

If you need to convince someone

In our words (a paraphrase, not a quotation): when someone is stuck on a big idea, it may be a normal part of a real shift in how they see things, not a lack of effort. Saying the answer again, the same way, may not get them through.

What it means for you

1. Find the doorway ideas in your area. Ask experienced colleagues: “What did you finally get that made everything else make sense?” Those ideas probably feel obvious to you now, which is exactly why learners need help with them.
2. Start from what people need to do. If a doorway idea is what lets someone act differently, such as spotting a patient who is quietly getting worse, give it more time than the facts around it.
3. Try a different angle. If someone is stuck, use a picture, a real case or an everyday comparison rather than repeating your first explanation. Say out loud that this bit is hard for everyone.
4. Watch for “it’s quite simple really”. If you hear yourself say it, ask whether you remember what it felt like not to know.

How it appears in Teaching That Lands

Not taught directly in the three core sessions. Useful background when you plan teaching on an idea your learners find stubbornly hard. See also threshold concepts.

The small print

• Which paper this is. This page covers the first paper, from 2003. It came out as a report from the project, known as ETL, and in a conference book edited by Chris Rust (pages 412–424). The best-known journal follow-up is Meyer and Land (2005), “Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2)”, in Higher Education 49(3), 373–388 (DOI 10.1007/s10734-004-6779-5).
• A guide, not a checklist. Meyer and Land hedged most of the features with words like “probably” and “possibly”. The fifth one, bounded, means the idea marks out the edges of a subject area.
• Liminal comes from a word for a doorway or threshold. Mimicry is Meyer and Land’s word for copying the right words without the understanding.
• Examples. Meyer and Land’s own examples came mostly from economics and maths, such as opportunity cost. Ideas suggested for healthcare, such as the body keeping itself steady (homeostasis), come from later writers and rest on the same expert judgement.
• Later work. Meyer and Land’s 2006 book, Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding, gathers examples from many subjects.