Exploring Threshold Concepts for Intermediate Students

Each year, we graduate a fair number of students with college degrees in computing-related disciplines. Each year, we lose a fair number of students out of the discipline. We spend a good deal of time focusing on what is causing students to leave or fail. We do not spend a lot of time focusing on the learning journey and supporting students throughout their transformative experiences. Threshold concepts are those concepts or learning experiences which define the overall disciplinary learning journey, enabling the learner to see from a new perspective, participate in discourse previously unavailable to them, and engage with the world from a transformed frame of understanding. They are often those concepts difficult for students to understand within a discipline such as "personhood' in Philosophy, 'gravity' in Physics, or 'limit' in Mathematics. As a result of this transformation and the resultant traversal of a liminal state, elements of an identity developed. In this poster, we present our current work identifying potential threshold concepts experienced by intermediate computer science students and consider the impact of these concepts on their development of an identity within computer science.