Dr Rehan Shah was specially invited to deliver a research workshop seminar on his education research work on 'Identifying and recognising threshold concepts in undergraduate mathematics' to academic staff comprising lecturers and researchers from the Mathematics Education Research Group at the Institute of Education and the Mathematics Department at University College London (UCL). He delivered the workshop together with his third-year undergraduate student researcher, Mr Ilanthiraiyan Sivagnanamoorthy, who has also written several papers with Dr Shah as part of their research work for a related project on developing proficiency-based mathematical assessment inventories.

The workshop commenced with an introduction, background and examples and non-examples of threshold concepts in mathematics, which was delivered by Ilan. This was then followed by an interactive, hands-on activity led by Dr Shah with participants actively engaging in identifying and critiquing potential threshold concepts from a given list of concepts.

In preparation for the session, participants were also provided with an introductory book chapter as preparatory reading which provided a general background of threshold concepts from prior literature. During the session, they were then introduced to the framework which they applied to classify which of the given undergraduate mathematics concepts they deemed to be threshold concepts. This was then critiqued and reviewed through discussion-based feedback delivered by each of the participant groups.

The workshop was extremely well received by academic colleagues and several PhD students, many of whom were keen to reflect on similar concepts encountered within their own teaching, in order to enhance the learning experience of students on their modules. Dr Shah and Ilan's workshop insights promoted active participation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between UCL's mathematics lecturers and education researchers, which was highly commended by the seminar organisers.