The specificity of this question is mainly focused towards medicine, pharmacy, biology, Nursing and other allied health sciences.
Meyer and Land described threshold concepts as ‘portals’ that open up ‘new and previously inaccessible’ ways of thinking about something and ‘a transformed way of understanding or interpreting or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress’ (Meyer & Land, 2003).
A threshold concept is thus seen as something distinct within what university teachers would typically describe as ‘core concepts’. A core concept is a conceptual ‘building block’ that progresses understanding of the subject; it has to be understood but it does not necessarily lead to a qualitatively different view of subject matter.
So, for example, the concept of gravity — the idea that any two bodies attract one another with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them — represents a threshold concept, whereas the concept of a centre of gravity does not, although the latter is a core concept in many of the applied sciences (Meyer & Land, 2003).
References:
Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.
'Core' concept implies fundamental concept and when the same is built up further to a point, it transforms / yields / change into different level. The point at which this transformation happens is 'Threshold'.
Eg. In surfactant chemistry, 'Surfactant Solubilization' is a core concept and upon continual solubilization there reaches a point called CMC i.e Critical Miscellar Concentration and the point is called threshold point after which the phase change happens in the surfactant molecules.
Dear Dr Manohari
'Better late than never'.
Thanks for for sharing your answer. In fact, the example is a well-elaborated one. The point of transformation makes a few or many core/basic concept/s into 'Threshold concept. Those are troublesome, integrative, irreversible, bounded & traverse liminality.
I am looking forward to more replies for this question.
A threshold concept is not the same as a core concept or foundational idea. Let me give you an example. A foundational concept in writing might be that of rhetoric – the persuasive, informative and artful forms that speech and writing can take. However, knowing the principles and rules of rhetoric doesn’t help a writer to understand what they are doing. It is the understanding that writing is both social and rhetorical that makes a difference to the ways in which we approach writing. Once we understand that our writing communicates with people across time and space, and that we want them to respond in particular ways to our texts, once we connect purpose with audience, we can make authoring decisions about what rhetoric we use. And how.
Ref: https://patthomson.net/2018/02/26/threshold-concepts-in-academic-writing/
About Pat Thomson
Pat Thomson is Professor of Education in the School of Education, The University of Nottingham, UK
Thanks Ana MARIA Rehbein for adding a valuable contribution to my question. I absolutely agreed with you that 'threshold concept' is extremely different from that of core concept. There was a lot of struggle understanding this very concept. The word 'concept' kept my understanding confined to the content-focused view of knowledge/curriculum. That was not actually the case. In fact threshold concept is beyond the content oriented version of the knowledge. The threshold concept framework discerns a class of concepts more than the curriculum entities, the internalisation of which can bring epistemic and ontological shift in learners.
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