Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Love Mental Models? Study Threshold Concepts! - by Miguel Barbosa

Your must-read of the day: 

Link to: Love Mental Models? Study Threshold Concepts!
I think that understanding how to learn about mental models remains (unexplored and unpopular). In other words, the journey that every aspiring renaissance thinker must undertake in order to become “worldly” isn’t as talked about or referenced. Here are some questions around this area: 
How can we facilitate the discovery, learning, & comprehension of mental models? 
What are the stages/phases in the learning of new mental models? 
How does our perception/understanding change as we learn new concepts?
Recently, I came across a new area in pedagogy that changed my thinking about acquiring worldly wisdom. Specifically, I stumbled across a paper titled, “Threshold Concepts & Troubling Knowledge Linkages to Learning & Practice ” by Meyer and Land. This paper identifies the challenges and phases of learning new concepts (mental models). Furthermore, according to the authors, on our journey towards learning there are “threshold concepts” i.e. levels/gateways that we need to cross before mastering a subject.