Library Instruction West 2016

A long-term qualitative study of the student experience at Mount Royal University sheds light on how students perceive threshold concepts related to information literacy (IL). The transcripts of over 400 interviews provide evidence of students in various stages of learning, from seeing only walls with no doorways, let alone thresholds, to looking back at breakthrough moments in learning. While students use entirely different language to the ACRL Framework, they nevertheless describe understanding of the concepts, and related practices and dispositions. Understanding these concepts from the  students' point of view may assist with developing activities and assignments, that encourage crossing these thresholds, and assessments that can help both the students and us as teachers know when that crossing happens. After a brief introduction, participants will work with excerpts from the study to discern markers of learning related to threshold concepts and use those markers to generate ideas for teaching.