How have core concepts been identified in other disciplines?
Over the past 30 years, a range of approaches have been developed to identify core concepts, mostly employing groups of disciplinary experts to identify the critical ideas that all students need to master. Most disciplines have used a Delphi method, involving a group of experts completing cycles of surveying and refinement until consensus is reached (Boneau, 1990; Brownell et al., 2014; Landrum, 1993; Merkel, 2012; Parekh et al., 2017; Wright & Hamilton, 2008). Core concepts have also been extracted from textbooks, either via page-by-page expert analysis (Zechmeister & Zechmeister, 2000) or via data-mining techniques (Foster et al., 2012).