Overcoming barriers to student understanding

Overcoming Barriers to Student Learning explores why certain students "get stuck" at particular points in the curriculum whilst others grasp concepts with comparative ease. It proposes a "threshold concepts" approach to the curriculum, arguing that in certain disciplines there are "conceptual gateways" or "portals" that lead to previously inaccessible, and initially perhaps "troublesome," ways of thinking about something. A new way of understanding, interpreting, or viewing a topic may thus emerge - having a transformative effect on internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. While maintaining that knowledge should indeed be "troubling" in order for it to be transformative, this book provides new perspectives on helping students through such conceptual difficulty in order to enhance learning and teaching environments in higher education, and in other educational sectors. It discusses: Ways of dealing with the kinds of anxiety, self-doubt and frustration that learning can evoke in students; How we might help our students not to avoid the troublesomeness, but to feel more confident in coping with it, resolving it and moving on with confidence; What might a