Current issues with the identification of threshold concepts in nursing.

While there has been some growth in the body of literature on threshold concepts in health science disciplines, the nature of this discourse and which approaches have proved successful remains unclear. This paper illustrates one of the primary issues facing the development of threshold concepts in nursing education literature specifically - a lack of transparent and rigorous processes for their identification. The paper briefly examines the methods that have been utilised to identify threshold concepts in the nursing education literature, and what issues using these approaches raise. It then considers how the field might further develop in order to best engage the benefits that threshold concept analysis and identification may have for curriculum development and teaching in nursing.

Signature pedagogies: An integrative review of an emerging concept in nursing education.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this paper is to provide an integrative review of the literature associated with signature pedagogies and to discover what lessons have been learned about unearthing, articulating and applying signature pedagogies across a variety of disciplines, but particularly with respect to nursing. DESIGN: A systematic search of databases using key terms was utilised with a particular focus to papers emerging from nursing disciplines. DATA SOURCES: The databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, ERIC, Web of Science and Google Scholar were searched for literature from 2005 to 2018 inclusive. REVIEW METHODS: An initial examination of titles and abstracts by the authors resulted in the retrieval of 45 papers and following the application of exclusion criteria, 25 papers were included. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Signature pedagogy literature is a developing area and scholars both in nursing disciplines and beyond, often fail to develop on Lee Shulman's framework in their identification of signature pedagogies, resulting in poorly adapted conceptions. Ways forward include closer linking with the original signature pedagogy framework in research, the development of robust evidence-based signature pedagogy identification processes in disciplines and a reconsideration of the esteem of scholars performing signature pedagogies within disciplines.