Threshold concepts in Economics: a case study

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This chapter documents a collaborative investigation of students’ developing understanding of two threshold concepts in Economics which was carried out in the context of the Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses (ETL) project. ETL was a large-scale research project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of their Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). The notion of a threshold concept is part of the larger conceptual framework developed by the ETL project. The main issues here are whether it provides practitioners with a novel and useful pedagogic tool and whether thinking about teaching-learning environments in terms of threshold concepts has the potential to enhance them. Many of the economists who were interviewed identified concepts which they regarded as thresholds for their discipline and some of them suggested that threshold concepts may be particularly important at the beginning of an Economics degree course.