STEM Graduate Students’ Systems Thinking, Modeling and Scientific Understanding—The Case of Food Production

Akiri, Effrat; Tal, Marina; Peretz, Roee; Dori, Dov; Dori, Yehudit Judy

doi:10.3390/app10217417

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Principals who delegate responsibilities to their teachers can also contribute to their empowerment and thus to their personal development (Lumpkin, 2008). The professional dimension focuses on learning and developing new ideas and activities (Akiri et al, 2020;Avargil et al, 2012). Studies show that teachers who prepare classroom activities improve their sense of ownership and attachment to these activities (Bayar, 2014).…”

Section: Teachers' Professional Growth (Pg)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Professional Growth of Novice and Experienced STEM Teachers

Akiri

Dori

2021

J Sci Educ Technol

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The first years of teaching are crucial for novice teachers’ integration into and retainment in the education system. The support they receive from experienced teachers impacts their professional development. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers require specialized support from domain-specific mentors. In this study, we examined how a three-level mentoring support system contributes to STEM novice teachers’ professional growth (PG) and to their mentors. The support system levels are individual mentoring, group mentoring, and mentoring networks. Based on the framework of teachers’ professional development, there are three PG dimensions: personal, professional, and social. Our research goal was to analyze teachers’ professional growth by the various mentoring level and dimension combinations. The study, conducted using a mixed methods approach, included 123 novice and 78 experienced STEM teachers. We examined the novice teachers’ perceptions of their teaching efficacy, the mentoring factors, correlations between the professional growth dimensions, and the contribution of each support level to the growth dimensions. We found that experienced teachers perceive novice teachers’ efficacy as lower than that perceived by the novice teachers. We identified gaps between the mentoring factors described by novice and experienced teachers and a strong correlation between the growth dimensions. All three mentoring support levels facilitate substantive personal, professional, and social growth. Individual mentoring contributes the most to all three growth dimensions, followed by mentoring networks. The contribution of this research is its elucidation of the intertwined support levels, which provide scaffolds for the novice teachers and facilitate the growth of the experienced teachers.

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Section: Teachers' Professional Growth (Pg)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Professional Growth of Novice and Experienced STEM Teachers

Akiri

Dori

2021

J Sci Educ Technol

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“…The conceptual modeling language and methodology used in the current study is OPM-Object-Process Methodology (Dori, 2016)-which is ISO 1 19,450 and has been implemented in a dedicated online modeling platform, as elaborated in the Materials and Methods section. OPM has been researched over the years in educational contexts Akiri et al, 2020;Peretz et al, 2023), and it is the most researched model-based systems engineering modeling method (Dong et al, 2022). Due to its simplicity, intuitiveness, and bimodality (Dong et al, 2022), as well as its domain-independent nature, OPM is most suitable for teaching, learning, and assessment of learning in various disciplines (Dori, 1995).…”

Section: Conceptual Modeling and Stem Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to our previous research (Akiri et al, 2020;Peretz et al, 2023), most pre-and in-service STEM teachers lack basic systems thinking and conceptual modeling proficiency. These deficiencies have been noted also by Yoon et al (2017) and Arnold and Wade (2017).…”

Section: The Online Learning Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Developing and assessing pre- and in-service science and engineering teachers’ systems thinking and modeling skills through an asynchronous online course

Peretz

Dori

2023

Front. Educ.

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Systems thinking and modeling are two critical 21st-century skills that teachers and educators are expected to impart to students, and students are expected to acquire and master them as part of their preparation to become literate citizens of a society and environment that is becoming ever more complex. Systems thinking is a thought process in which assumptions about interactions among interconnected elements of a system or a phenomenon can help predict the system’s behavior, outcomes, and in the case of human-made artifacts, the value to its beneficiaries. Conceptual modeling involves the simultaneous visual and textual representation of one’s ideas about a phenomenon or system in science or engineering. The qualitative study described here aimed to examine the effect of an online interdisciplinary asynchronous course on the development of systems thinking and conceptual modeling skills among pre- and in-service science and engineering teachers. Engaging in a qualitative case study with an exploratory orientation, we investigated how science and engineering teachers and teacher educators coped with (a) online learning of conceptual modeling and systems thinking using Object-Process Methodology in a food and sustainability context, and (b) developing an online assignment for teaching those skills to their students and assessing them. Research tools included the online assignment that the participants developed, dedicated rubrics for analyzing their assignments, accounting for use of modeling, media, visualization, micro–macro-process scientific understanding levels, and a mix of closed- and open-ended questions. Additionally, the participants’ reflections were analyzed to characterize their sense of self-efficacy and academic progression. We characterize five teacher-developed assignment cases along with the related teachers’ reflections, which exposed the benefits they had gained from the online course, as well as the systems thinking and modeling challenges they had faced. Analysis of the effect of the course with emphasis on the final task reveals that this approach is effective for developing the systems thinking and modeling skills of the teachers and serves as a catalyst for their professional development. The study offers a methodological contribution by providing a basis for evaluating teachers’ assessment knowledge and skills using a six attributes rubric.

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“…Problem-based learning places the student in a confusing, unstructured situation, before which they assume the leading role: they identify the real problem and learn, through research, what is necessary to reach a viable solution [21][22][23]. In [21], problem-based learning within primary education is a pedagogical experience developed to investigate and solve problems, it is an organizer of the curriculum and also a teaching strategy [24][25][26].…”

Section: Active Methodologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Sustainable City”: A Steam Project Using Robotics to Bring the City of the Future to Primary Education Students

Vicente¹,

Llinares

Sánchez

2020

Sustainability

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This article presents a STEAM project, “Sustainable City”, based on educational robotics whose objective is to bring the problems of climate change closer to primary school students. The participants were 30 students (aged 10–11) from 5th year of Primary Education and the project consisted of 14 sessions in which different active methodologies such as project-based learning, collaborative learning and the flipped classroom were carried out. A pre-test and a post-test were carried out and the results were better in the post-test, which indicates that the students improved their skills and increased their motivation. As a conclusion, this STEAM project, which is adapted to the Spanish LOMCE curriculum, can be a reference for other teachers to bring their students closer to the problem of environmental change through educational robotics and the use of active methodologies.

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STEM Graduate Students’ Systems Thinking, Modeling and Scientific Understanding—The Case of Food Production

Cited by 11 publications

References 46 publications

Professional Growth of Novice and Experienced STEM Teachers

Professional Growth of Novice and Experienced STEM Teachers

Developing and assessing pre- and in-service science and engineering teachers’ systems thinking and modeling skills through an asynchronous online course

“Sustainable City”: A Steam Project Using Robotics to Bring the City of the Future to Primary Education Students

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