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CHAPTER ONE Threshold Concepts and Their Application to Information Literacy Instruction We—Amy, Silvia, and Lori—became interested in threshold concepts because we needed an answer to a really basic, practical question. We had to stand up in front of a roomful of first-year students for 10 weeks in a row. What were we going to teach? When we were starting our careers as instruction librarians, the Associa- tion of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) offered the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education to guide our information literacy instruction sessions. The multilevel Standards didn’t represent a course or session outline exactly, but they articulated the many things that an infor- mation literate student would be able to do. We soon found that in spite of copious details, outcomes, and performance indicators, the Standards did not lend themselves to a coherent course plan. Like many librarians, we found ourselves in a teaching role without hav- ing had any formal instruction on how to teach. Learning on the job means that we enter the profession not quite certain of our instructional content. For us, the threshold concept model helped answer the question of what to teach better than rereading the Standards did.