PART 2: HOW THRESHOLD CONCEPTS CAN INFORM CURRICULUM AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
HOW THRESHOLD CONCEPTS CAN INFORM CURRICULUM AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
AN EXAMPLE FROM GENERAL EDUCATION REFORM AT YORK COLLEGE OF PENNSYLVANIA
 Our metaconcept: General Education should be connected to, and prepare all students for,
disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning
 Central Threshold Concepts Considered:
• writing is a knowledge-making activity
• disciplinary and professional identities are constructed through writing
• writing is a way of enacting disciplinarity
-----------------
Problem 1: General Education as Content Delivery
RETHINKING THE PARADIGM: GENERAL EDUCATION WRIT LARGE
Threshold Concepts in
Disciplinary Perspectives Courses:
Treating writing as a knowledge-making activity
and a subject of study within a discipline
acculturates students to how discourse uncovers
(or covers) knowledge, and asks them to study
alternative ways of making knowledge within
disciplinary discourses.
Encouraging disciplinary metacognition helps
students to consider the underlying approaches
to, and implications of, the discourses of their
major field.
General Education
4 Disciplinary
Perspectives
courses
Interdisciplinary
Constellations (4
courses, 1
theme, 4
disciplines
Major Content
Area
Building incrementally toward disciplinary integration: The “Generation Next” Curriculum at York College
1.
2.
3.
4.
First Year Seminar: Multiple themes, common outcomes (interpersonal communication, creativity)
Foundations courses: First-Year Communication (Written, Oral, Visual), Advanced Communication (disciplinespecific), Quantitative Literacy, American Citizenship, Global Citizenship).
Disciplinary Perspectives courses: Arts, Humanities, Social and Behavioral Science, Natural and Physical Sciences
Interdisciplinary Constellation courses: Four courses, including an integrative capstone experience/course
PART 2: HOW THRESHOLD CONCEPTS CAN INFORM CURRICULUM AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
Problem 2: Students lack experience with metacognition (and so how discourse shapes
disciplines)
McKeachie (1988) explains, challenges students face include:
• Students “enter the higher levels of education with . . . strategies that handicap them in achieving success.” (p. 5)
• “[N]either home backgrounds nor schools have helped young adults become aware of alternative ways of
approaching learning situations, and of options other than increasing or decreasing one’s effort as one approaches
different learning situations” (p. 5)
• Teachers give feedback about the correctness of learning outcomes but not about how to achieve these outcomes.
Metacognition and Transfer as Goals in General Education Reform: things education research tells us
“Whereas cognitive strategies enable one to make progress—to build knowledge—metacognitive strategies enable one to
monitor and improve one’s progress—to evaluate understanding and apply knowledge to new situations. Thus
metacognition is vital to cognitive effectiveness.” (Gourgey 1998, 82)
[Metacognitive skills include] “knowing when and how to use different learning strategies; how to [independently] plan,
monitor, and control learning; and how to transfer learning skills acquired in the classroom to other contexts” (Gourgey
(1998, p. 81)
Romainville (1994) found that students exhibiting higher levels of achievement were aware of their cognitive strategies and
the factors influencing them. As compared to students exhibiting lesser levels of achievement, high achievers exhibited
better structured metacognitive knowledge that was more highly centered on cognitive processes. (Lana Ivanitskaya).
Students enrolled in interdisciplinary programs sharpen their metacognitive skills through deliberate reflection on their
own ways of thinking. The process begins as learners apply interpretive tools across disciplines and thereby face their own
internal set of implicit theories, assumptions, beliefs, and prejudices. (Lana Ivanitskaya).
Interdisciplinary education readily facilitates the development of structural knowledge: an understanding of higher-order
relationships and organizing principles (Goldsmith & Johnson, 1990)…. To a higher degree than traditional, single topic
approaches, interdisciplinary learning fosters a problem-focused integration of information consistent with more complex
knowledge structures. In addition to higher-order cognitive processing and critical thinking, interdisciplinary programs
facilitate students’ metacognitive skills. (Lana Ivanitskaya).
Applying Threshold Concepts to Encourage Metacognition in Disciplinary Perspectives Courses
• writing is a knowledge-making activity
• disciplinary and professional identities are constructed through writing
• writing is a way of enacting disciplinarity
“Disciplinary Perspectives Courses demonstrate the ways that knowledge is constructed in various academic
disciplines. These courses use the content to expose the methodologies that disciplines use to arrive at that
knowledge, as well as to help students acquire learning outcomes appropriate for the disciplinary area. These courses
provide students with the genuine basis for integrative learning in the Constellations and in the majors. Provided with
such an understanding, students are better prepared to take on more in-depth work in a variety of disciplines, and
apply other disciplinary approaches to their own major-specific work. Faculty teach these courses from their own area
of knowledge and expertise, while situating that area within the broader disciplinary categories, thus helping students
to see shared approaches among the particular disciplines within a given category”
(from York College Generation Next planning documents)
PART 2: HOW THRESHOLD CONCEPTS CAN INFORM CURRICULUM AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
Problem 3: Faculty have already internalized the disciplinary discourses they use.
Kimberly A. White Smith: Developing students’ metacognition requires teachers who are knowledgeable about varied
comprehension strategies and explicit about teaching them. . . . Unlike cognition, which is merely the act of knowing,
metacognition is the learner’s reflection about what he or she already knows or is in the process of learning (Smith, 2004),
which we contend is a missing link in instruction in most classrooms today. [Metacognition] is achieved through the
engagement of teachers and students in parallel developmental activities. As co-constructors of knowledge, together they
become comfortable, confident, independent, reflective, informed, and collaborative learners. Sustained learning can only
be achieved with deliberate attention to the motivation level of both teacher and student.
Mittendorf (2004): Most college professors learned how to be historians more or less by osmosis, without explicit
instruction on how to perform many of the operations necessary to produce historical knowledge.
Mittendorf (2004): A study by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, (2000) links the scientific study of thinking and learning to
classroom practices. Even though their approaches differ, both reach the conclusion that disciplines need to be more
involved in the research on how people think and how students learn.
In preparation for course and assignment design of Disciplinary Perspectives classes at York College, I asked faculty to do a
writing exercise that I hoped would help stimulate metacognitive thinking about their disciplines. When asked about how
they learned about their disciplines and how it differs from other disciplinary thinking, there was a clear division in areas.
In general, many faculty tended to think in terms of equivalencies among disciplines, showed little evidence of
metacognition about their disciplinary work and discourses, and focused more on articulating a clear, accepted, and
already-finished process. Typical answers were:
• Such methodology is not unique to the social and behavioral sciences . . . . The broad outline for the scientific method is
the same for all empirical fields of study.
• I’m not really sure on how to answer these questions. To be honest, I do not know how they differ from other areas of
study.
• My discipline uses many of the same methods that other social science disciplines use.
• Similar to every academic discipline, scholars begin with a problem or a question that needs to be solved.
• Not unique in method—just unique in topic-subject focus of study (which is actually very diverse). Knowing how to
methodologically and statistically control for possible extraneous variables or covariates is important, but we are not the
only science to do so.
• These methods share a good deal of commonality with the other sciences, from what I know of the methods employed.
• We use the scientific method – which is not a method unique to my own area of study, but is why psychology would be
considered a science.
For others, and especially those involved in pedagogical research, faculty stressed differences among the disciplines,
provided richer metacognition on what they do in their disciplines, on knowledge-making and discursive processes, and
on interdisciplinarity.
•
•
In many ways, history is a difficult discipline to pin down. History as a discipline far more so than social sciences
privileges the development of a compelling narrative. Historians, like fiction writers, tell stories, but historians’
stories are grounded in how we understand the evidence we’ve seen in appropriate historical sources.
Historians employ methods used by both social scientists and those in the humanities. So what makes us
unique, paradoxically, is the interdisciplinarity of our field.
PART 2: HOW THRESHOLD CONCEPTS CAN INFORM CURRICULUM AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
Education research is distinctive for its reliance on qualitative and mixed methods approaches. It is frequently
quite pragmatic in orientation and designed to address the real-world concerns of educators.
One unique research feature is the use of teacher action research—that is teaching regular k-12 classroom
teachers to examine the problems that occur in their classrooms and document and gather data as different
attempts are tried to solve those problems.
Human services, family studies and behavioral sciences are by definition interdisciplinary fields and as such there
the methodology used and the research questions addressed vary widely. I think as a field we are realizing the
importance of meaningful participation of the groups we are studying in all phases of the methodology.
Once an object of study is determined (along with its context) the methodological process is selected. This, to me,
is a conscious choice that takes into account the rhetorical dimension of methods. Often in disciplinary contexts
the rhetorical dimension is not acknowledged, however. The ability to rhetorically frame a method is, to me,
unique to interdisciplinary humanities. For example, in research one could focus on the comparative and
contrastive rhetorical implications of analysis. That is, the “study” would be methodologically reflective, seeing
that it is an intellectual investment in relation to other forms of intellectual investment. The result is critical
insofar as methods determine objects. If a method yields an object, it is important to take into account that seeing
the object or how one sees the object “constructs” the object.
I think philosophers probably spend more time debating what philosophy is than do other disciplines and have
more disagreements regarding what philosophy is than are present in other disciplines. This suggests one aspect
of philosophy is its self-reflective nature. Chemists do chemistry but perhaps they begin to do philosophy of
science when they ask “what is chemistry? What is science? What is it that we are doing?” So I guess one unique
feature of the philosophical method is that it is generally self-reflective—always questioning what it is one is
doing when one is doing philosophy. . . . Philosophers spend a lot of time reconstructing and critiquing arguments.
I’m often reminded when teaching critical thinking how difficult these skills are to acquire and how most people
don’t give them much thought. I suppose that one way to think about what is unique about philosophy is that
professors and students of philosophy live and breathe arguments.
I have found that the best methods are those that involve students’ hands-on involvement in their learning rather
than passive reception of material through “teacher talk.” I see my role as a facilitator in the learning process
rather than the source of information.
•
•
•
•
•
•
Applying the Threshold Concepts through Faculty Development
•
Faculty Learning Communities using the Mittendorf model (“Decoding the Disciplines”) and beginning with
educational research
•
Workshops (Gen Ed Workday and “Camp Teach and Learn”) using reflective writing exercises followed by
interdisciplinary discussion groups to lay bare methodological differences; arrange groups to include facilitators
who understand the concept of metacognition and can facilitate that learning.
•
Collaborative Course Design focusing on metacognition as a central outcome for Disciplinary Perspectives
•
Collaborative Assignment Design using metacognition as a key indicator and specific assignments as key
measures of student learning
•
Aligning Curricular Goals of Disciplinary Perspectives courses with the goals of Interdisciplinary Constellation
courses and majors so as to encourage an integrative curriculum
PART 2: HOW THRESHOLD CONCEPTS CAN INFORM CURRICULUM AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
Faculty Development: Exercises and Thought Experiments
Exercise 1: Touring your Discipline (conducted in multi-disciplinary groups)
Give us a tour of your discipline.
o
o
o
What are your objects of study?
What are your methods of study?
What uses of language in your discipline specifically focus on those objects and methods? The way
articles are constructed? How evidence is presented? What media are used?
Exercise 2: Imagining the Metacognitive Student (conducted in multi-disciplinary groups)
Thinking about the key concepts, methodologies, and “troublesome knowledge” of your discipline, write an
“ideal” student observation from your disciplinary perspectives course—an expression of what you hope
students leave your course understanding
Begin with “In this course, I learned . . . .”
Exercise 3: Course Design for the encouraging the study of disciplinary discourses (in uni-disciplinary groups)
FIRST consider this: In your disciplinary perspective or introduction to the discipline course, what is:
1. Your first assignment that engages disciplinary discourses?
2. Your final assignment that engages them in, and assesses their ability to work within, disciplinary
discourses?
NOW: Construct those writing assignments (and others along the way) in ways that encourages students to
better understand why writers in your discipline make the moves they do. In groups, create/share a few
examples.
PART 2: HOW THRESHOLD CONCEPTS CAN INFORM CURRICULUM AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
Select Bibliography on Educational Research on Metacognition
Baloche, Lynda, John Hynes, and Helen Berger. “Moving toward the Integration of Professionaland General Education.”
Action in Teacher Education, 18.1 (1996): 1–9.
Bransford, John D., Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, (eds.). How People Learn: Brain, Mind,Experience, and School.
Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2000.
Curwen, Margaret Sauceda, Roxanne Miller, Kimberly A. White-Smith, and Robert Calfee. “Increasing Teachers’
Metacognition Develops Students’ Higher Learning during Content Area Literacy Instruction.” Issues in Teacher
Education 19.2 (2010): 127-51.
Diaz, A., Mittendorf, J., Pace, D., and Shopkow, L. “The History Learning Project: A Department Decodes its Students.”
Journal of American History 94:4 (2008): 1211-1244.
Donald, J. G. Learning to Think. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.
Gourgey, Annette F. “Metacognition in Basic Skills Instruction.” Metacognition in Learning and Instruction: Theory,
Research and Practice. Ed., Hope J. Hartman. Netherlands: Springer, 2001, 33-69
Ivanitskaya, Lana, Deborah Clark, George Montgomery, and Ronald Primeau, “Interdisciplinary Learning: Process
Outcomes,” Innovative Higher Education Outcomes 27.2 (2002): 95- 111.
Pace, D. “Decoding the Reading of History: An Example of the Process.” In Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn
Disciplinary Ways of Thinking. New Directions for Teaching and Learning 98, San Francisco, Josssey-Bass, 2004.
Pierce, William. Metacogniton: Study Strategies, and Motivation. A greatly expanded text version of a workshop presented
November 17, 2004, at Prince George's Community
College. http://academic.pg.cc.md.us/~wpeirce/MCCCTR/metacognition.htm#IX
Romainville, Marc. (1994). “Awareness of Cognitive Strategies: The Relationship between UniversityStudents’
Metacognition and their Performance. Studies in Higher Education 19.3: 359–366.
Rowntree, Derek. A Dictionary of Education. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982.
Taylor, Shawn. “Better Learning through Better Thinking: Developing Students’ Metacognitive Abilities. Journal of College
Reading and Learning, 30.1 (1999): 34-45.
Tobias, S. “Disciplinary Cultures and General Education: What Can We Learn from OurLearners?” Teaching Excellence, 4.6:
1–3
McKeachie, W. J. (1988). “The Need for Study Strategy Training.” In Weinstein, Goetz, and Alexander (Eds.), Learning and
Study Strategies: Issues in Assessment, Instruction, and Evaluation. New York: Academic Press, 1998: 3-9.
Wineburg, Sam. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia, PA.:
Temple University Press, 2001.