Interview Iterations and Improvements for Identifying Intermediate Computer Science Threshold Concepts

WIP Research Paper: Identifying the Threshold Concepts within a discipline illuminates the key concepts or components within the curriculum. Once students have overcome the barrier of learning these concepts, they often will be better able to identify as members of that community, and understanding a threshold concept opens the door to learning additional concepts. Within computer science, there has been much debate over what concepts could potentially be threshold concepts. Meyer and Land originally defined threshold concepts as resulting in an individual being placed into a state of uncertainty or liminality, and successfully traversing this liminal state results in a transformation of the individual with potential feelings of accomplishment. While there has been some work attempting to identify threshold concepts within the first year or beginning stages of programming, little work has considered the intermediate years (years 2 and 3) of university study and what potential threshold concepts exist during this time period. Our goal with this work is to help address this gap that exists by answering the following research question: What do intermediate students identify as being troublesome and/or ‘uncomfortable to learn’ within their computer science coursework?” A first cohort of participants were interviewed in late 2022 and coding began in the first quarter of 2023. The coding of these interviews proved challenging. The students who were interviewed often did not give enough information about a concept for the coders to identify whether the concepts had the key characteristics of threshold concepts. It was considered and accepted that the original interview protocol was not supporting the participants well in eliciting the types of information needed to identify a concept as threshold. The interview protocol was redesigned, and new interviews commenced. The work presented here is a continued discussion of the initial findings and the subsequent change in interview protocol, with the primary improvement being an inclusion of concept mapping. Concept maps, or a graphical representation of the interrelationship of topics and ideas, coupled with an intentional simplification of associated terminology, are expected to reduce cognitive load as participants reflect on their learning experiences. Interviews with the revised protocol including concept maps have been more engaging and productive in identifying potential threshold concepts within the intermediate computer science curricula.