Students often naively assume that pursuing sustainability is necessarily costly and difficult. However, proponents of "weak" or "business-centered" sustainability argue that well-crafted sustainability initiatives may simultaneously reduce carbon footprint and enhance financial performance. This article describes a…

For many students biochemistry is a demanding course because they are expected to apply previously learned foundational concepts to new biological contexts. These foundational concepts serve as a scaffold onto which to build threshold concepts such as the physical basis of interactions. Unfortunately, many students possess misconceptions or gaps…

In this article, we propose a cross-pollination of two prominent lines of educational thought: open education (OE) and threshold concepts (TCs). Open education has gained an increased profile through the growing popularity of open educational resources (OER) and massive online open courses (MOOCs). Educators who create or make use of such…

Threshold concepts have been referred to as "jewels in the curriculum": concepts that are key to competency in a discipline but not taught explicitly. In biology, researchers have proposed the idea of threshold concepts that include such topics as variation, randomness, uncertainty, and scale. In this essay, we explore how the notion of…

This paper reviews the idea of threshold concepts in the context of conceptual change processes students experience at the cognitive and social dimensions of learning. Literature suggests that students' ontological views play a part in the development of their prior conceptions, which could be alternative to scientifically accepted ideas. It is…

Since about 2003, the notion of threshold concepts--the central ideas in any field that change how learners think about other ideas--have become difficult to escape at library conferences and in general information literacy discourse. Their visibility will likely only increase because threshold concepts figure prominently in the Framework for…

The authors argue that insufficient attention has been given to foundational concepts in special education. Two classes of foundational concepts are discussed: human constructions and logico-mathematical facts. Four human constructions are examined: (1) making teaching most important, (2) discriminating among ideas, (3) choosing conceptual models,…

In this article, the author describes an innovative approach for conceptualizing and managing career development tasks in the 21st century. Theoretical foundations and key concepts related to career flow theory are discussed.

First order knowledge and understanding, relating to the "stuff" of history, is, of course, absolutely fundamental to the development of children's historical knowledge and understanding. However, as Frances Blow shows, in a contribution to a series of articles exploring second order concepts in history published in Teaching History by…

Nondeterminism is a fundamental concept in computer science that appears in various contexts such as automata theory, algorithms and concurrent computation. We present a taxonomy of the different ways that nondeterminism can be defined and used; the categories of the taxonomy are domain, nature, implementation, consistency, execution and…

This article explores both the process and outcomes of a seminar series on the concept of access for people with learning difficulties. The seminar topics chosen to foster dialogue across professional and disciplinary boundaries included access to information, education, employment, the law, health, leisure, community, past histories and future…

In the 1920s and 1930s, Paul R. Hanna and Harold O. Rugg developed new textbooks that integrated social studies curriculum in the elementary grades for the first time. Each author's curriculum; Hanna's expanding environments framework and Rugg's recurring concepts with a focus on contemporary issues has significantly impacted today's elementary…

Last fall, at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science in New York, Barbara Genco, collection development director at the Brooklyn Public Library, taught a course on collection development principles, theory, and practice. "Library Journal" asked her to distill her curriculum down to 20 talking points that address…

The ever-increasing and complex demands on school principals are rapidly changing the nature of educational leadership. Communities and societies more generally are becoming increasingly aware of the wider impact of the way education is led, typified by the recent focus on developing emotional literacy (also known as social, emotional and…

Within the historical context of the development of chemistry, Avogadro's hypothesis represents a fundamental concept: It allowed Avogadro to explain Gay-Lussac's law of combining volumes and it allowed Cannizzaro to establish a more accurate set of atomic mass values. If students are going to understand the concept of relative atomic masses and…