Threshold concepts in religious studies: A qualitative and theoretical exploration of threshold concepts in a “nodal” curriculum
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores “threshold concepts” in North American religious studies undergraduate education. The threshold concepts approach concentrates on how certain concepts or learning experiences can act like the threshold of a doorway that opens onto a new perspective for the learner. Crucially, they come into play in learning to think like a professional within a discipline. Little work has been done on threshold concepts in religious studies. In this article I explore what threshold concepts might be central to it. I also distinguish religious studies as a “nodal” discipline, in contrast to “sequential” ones, and describe how threshold concepts function in a nodal curriculum differently than they do in a sequential one. Drawing on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning literature, plus my own focus group data from religious studies faculty and students, I argue that the threshold concepts approach is useful for religious studies professors examining what concepts should be at the heart of our curricula and what it means to “think like a religious studies scholar.”
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it