Venturing into the unknown: What evidence is there - one year later - of the impact of a threshold concept on students in a first year elective course?

Over the years, I have discovered that the majority of students to whom I teach introductory sociology take it as a required course or recommended elective for other programs, and that this one 14-week semester is therefore likely to be the only formal exposure to sociology that most will ever experience. Nevertheless, some sociologists have claimed that taking even one course in introductory sociology can make an important contribution to the general education of any individual (e.g. Howard and Zoeller, 2007), prompting me to ponder what my own students were gaining from this. Noticing the frequency with which their end-of-semester evaluations included comments about how taking sociology had ‘opened their eyes’, I started wondering whether these self-reported ‘epiphanies’ might actually correspond to transformative learning experiences (Mezirow, 1991) and what kind of lasting impact the course might therefore have upon them. This led me to focus on the impact of encountering the ‘sociological imagination’ - the recognition that individuals’ actions are largely shaped by the society in which they live. This is widely regarded as the single most important thing for students to understand in any introductory sociology course (Persell et al, 2007), in that it enables them to start ‘thinking like a sociologist’ (Pace and Middendorf, 2004). However, students may find this new way of thinking challenging and resist it, since it requires them to question familiar assumptions about personal agency. These features identify the ‘sociological imagination’ as a threshold concept (Meyer and Land, 2003), meaning that grasping it should generate an irreversible and enduring shift in perspective – much as my students seemed to be describing. I thus started investigating student learning in this course, focusing specifically on the impact of encountering the ‘sociological imagination’.

From 2012 to 2015, I collected data from 365 students in twelve first year sociology classes, using various Classroom Assessment Techniques (Angelo and Cross, 1993) in order to track how their understanding of this threshold concept developed throughout the semester. In a second phase of the research 106 of these students completed a follow-up survey, approximately one year later, which assessed their recall of the ‘sociological imagination’ and also tested their ability to apply it. My research findings revealed interesting differences amongst students in regard to how long it took them to grasp this concept, how well they were able to apply it by the end of the course, and what they recalled of it one year later. In my presentation I will briefly outline the study as a whole, before focusing on the findings from the follow-up survey and their implications. I will engage audience members by inviting them to identify threshold concepts faced by their own students (especially in similar introductory-level courses taken as electives) and to consider what they would expect them to remember once the course is over. I will end by commenting on how doing this research has not only altered my approach to teaching this particular concept, but has also re-ignited my enthusiasm for the course as a whole.