Threshold Concepts in the Engineering Educator’s Journey: A Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many engineering educators recognize and emphasize the key concepts and skills that are considerably more difficult and that hinder their learners' progress through their undergraduate studies.Many of these topics are considered threshold concepts and make the difference in a student's ability to do engineering things versus being an engineer.What many engineering educators don't recognize is that they too encounter threshold concepts that hinder their own journey to becoming effective educators. PURPOSE OR GOALUnfortunately, there is no analysis of studies of threshold concepts that identify those associated with teaching in either undergraduate engineering programs or post-secondary education in general.This study seeks to answer two questions about teaching-related threshold concepts: (1) what threshold concepts are identified as part of an educator's growth?and (2) what threshold concepts may cause a transformation in the way engineering educators carry out their day-to-day practices? APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODSThis paper reports the findings of a qualitative evidence synthesis (qualitative systematic review) of 20 journal articles and conference papers that study threshold concepts related to teaching in the post-secondary system.An initial search for studies of any design that examined threshold concepts related to teaching practice identified 1011 potential papers, 82 of which met the criteria for initial review.A deeper secondary review narrowed the list to 20 papers. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMESFinal review identified 14 threshold concepts associated with post-secondary educators' professional growth ranging from care and authenticity to course-related threshold concepts.These 14 threshold concepts were mapped to categories of Science, Technology, Mathematics and Engineering (STEM) educator practices and conceptions.Four clusters were identified in which mastery of the threshold concept could facilitate a change in day-today practice of engineering educators: teaching / pedagogy, learning, assessment, and teaching with technology. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARYThis study fills a gap in the literature by identifying teaching-related threshold concepts that may hinder the instructional development of engineering educators.It is hoped that these results will encourage engineering educators, and those responsible for their educational development, to recognize and support professional growth related to these potential thresholds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.070 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".