Third-year undergraduate student Ilanthiraiyan Sivagnanamoorthy (currently finishing a year-long industrial placement at GE Aerospace in Bristol) has successfully presented mathematics education research conducted with Dr Rehan Shah at the New Researchers Day for the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics (BSRLM) Summer Conference held on 13th June 2026 at Kings College London.

The work presented by Ilan as part of a session chaired by Dr Shah, presented findings and reflections gathered from a cross-institutional staff-focused interactive mathematics education workshop focusing on 'threshold concepts' and delivered at Queen Mary University of London over the past 2 years that featured 26 academic lecturers and educators teaching undergraduate mathematics modules across various STEM disciplines.

Following a brief introduction to threshold concepts and their characteristics, participants were asked to identify and evaluate a set of concepts from a sample module description of a core first-year undergraduate applied mathematics module against key threshold concepts criteria. The results highlight that while participants found some concepts easier to classify than others, they also struggled to conclusively evaluate concepts against certain threshold characteristics.

The notion of ‘threshold concepts’ can be considered akin to a portal, opening a new and previously inaccessible view of a topic, without which students would be unable to progress intellectually. They are also known to be particularlytroublesome for students due to their being conceptually difficult, alien or counter-intuitive at face value. Within HE mathematics, research literature has identified several potential threshold concepts such as functions, limits, complex numbers and mathematical proofs. Therefore, there is a strong need for mathematics educators to identify and recognise the implications of potential threshold concepts that exist within undergraduate mathematics modules.

The work will be published as a short paper (co-authored by Ilan and Dr Shah) as part of the formal BSRLM conference proceedings very soon and feeds into Dr Shah's forthcoming journal publication focusing on a comprehensive systematic review of troublesome mathematics concepts within STEM disciplines.