As I continue my literature review of Chemistry and its Threshold Concepts, I am realizing that many presentations have been done on the subject, but few if any scholarly articles and methodical studies have been generated. I have found one PhD thesis in an Irish context which I have yet to read. In my preliminary interview with one of the Chemistry professors at BYU, I realized that to talk about threshold concepts was foreign, but the idea that they were troublesome - and even the identification of a few of them, was innate. Good teachers intuitively pick up on the threshold concepts and some have even generated a way for dealing with them. I believe that understanding why they might be troublesome to the students is the real key to finding better ways of teaching them. I suspect that we think we know what makes certain topics in chemistry troublesome, but we haven't made our assumptions explicit, nor have we empirically tested them through observation and experience. I intend to use Spradley's participant observation approach to document the teaching of introductory topics in chemistry and then to use Perkins' framework of troublesomeness to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching methods, making recommendations for better pedagogical practice. Perhaps what I am doing is really an evaluation, but the outcome of the project will be mainly be a report on what pedagogical practices professors use to address threshold concepts. I do believe that the value of this study will be understanding of how professors think about and teach threshold concepts and how they conceptualize their troublesome nature.
