Applications of Systems Thinking in STEM Education

Abstract

Systems thinking is a holistic approach for examining complex problems and systems that focuses on the interactions among system components and the patterns that emerge from those interactions. Systems thinking can help students develop higher-order thinking skills in order to understand and address complex, interdisciplinary, real-world problems. Because of these potential benefits, there have been recent efforts to support the implementation of systems thinking approaches in chemistry education, including the development of the IUPAC Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education (STICE) Project and this Special Issue of the Journal of Chemical Education: "Reimagining Chemistry Education: Systems Thinking, and Green and Sustainable Chemistry". As part of these efforts, our purposes in this paper are to describe some of the potential benefits associated with systems thinking approaches, to identify the STEM education fields that have employed systems thinking approaches, to summarize some of the major findings about the applications of systems thinking in STEM education, and to present methods that have been used to assess systems thinking skills in STEM education. We found that, in general, systems thinking approaches have been applied in life sciences, earth sciences, and engineering but not in the physical or mathematical sciences. We also found that the primary emphasis of peer-reviewed publications was on the development of students', rather than teachers', systems thinking abilities. Existing tools for the assessment of systems thinking in STEM education can be divided into (a) assessment rubrics, (b) closed-ended tools, and (c) coding schemes, with each type of assessment tool having its own unique advantages and disadvantages. We highlight one particular case in which researchers applied an interdisciplinary framework for comprehensive assessment of systems thinking. Although systems thinking has not been widely researched or applied in chemistry education, many of the conceptual frameworks applied to systems thinking in other STEM education disciplines could potentially be applied in chemistry education. We argue that the benefits observed when applying systems thinking approaches in other STEM education disciplines could facilitate similar results for chemistry education. Finally, we provide considerations for future research and applications of systems thinking in chemistry education.

Faculty perspectives regarding the integration of systems thinking into chemistry education

“…Systems thinking does not have one, specific definition as different applications allow for slight modifications of how the framework is implemented. Here, systems thinking was taken to be ''a holistic approach for examining complex, realworld systems, in which the focus is not on the individual components of the system but on the dynamic interrelationships between the components and on the patterns and behaviours that emerge from those interrelationships'' (York et al, 2019).…”

“…The application of these, and other, systems thinking tools have only recently been applied in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, with research into systems thinking in STEM education gaining momentum in the last decade or so (York et al, 2019). By 2018, the US National Science Foundation had provided grant funding for 27 projects focusing on systems thinking within STEM education, amounting Fig.…”

Environmental Education for Students from School to University: Case Study on Biorefineries

“…Sci. 2019, 9,202 7 of 15 scientific competences of the students usually derived in more interest, as happened in this casestudy [29].…”

The Curious Construct of Active Learning

“…Recent work has begun to develop and study active-learning strategies that promote systems thinking, specifically around topics of sustainability in the Earth system (Gosselin et al, 2019). Likewise, there has recently been a movement to foreground systems thinking in chemistry education (York et al, 2019). However, virtually all systems of societal import are tremendously complex at the atomic/molecular level, and there has been scant work toward developing systems-thinking learning environments and assessments in chemistry.…”