System-thinking progress in engineering programs: A case for broadening the roles of students

Abstract

IntroductionComplex systems are prevalent in many scientific and engineering disciplines, which makes system thinking important for students of these fields. Duchifat 3 is a unique engineering educational extracurricular program, where high school students designed, assembled, and tested a nano-satellite.MethodsThis study applied qualitative methods to explore how the participants’ systems-thinking developed during the program. Participants were interviewed using the repertory grid interview, and a semi structured interview at the beginning and at the end of the project, while various observations were conducted throughout.ResultsWhile the participants were initially assigned narrow roles, each dealing with a single sub-system of the satellite, some chose to be involved with other sub-systems and aspects of the project. Our findings show that the broader the participants’ involvement was, the greater the progress they experienced in their systems-thinking. Participants who stayed focused on a single subsystem did not show progress, while participants who involved themselves with several sub-systems exhibited a more meaningful progress.DiscussionAlthough the program design aimed to assign students to a narrow role to enable them to achieve the educational goals, from the perspective of systems-thinking this was counterproductive. These findings shed light on the design of engineering programs such as the one examined here in terms of systems-thinking development. We discuss the implications of the findings for similar programs and make suggestions for improvement.

Abductive reasoning in modeling biological phenomena as complex systems

“…. (Tamir et al, 2023). These skills are addressed in the component mechanism phenomena (CMP) approach by Hmelo-Silver et al (2017).…”

“…This implies that extensive abductive reasoning does not necessarily lead to the connection of macro and micro levels, which indicates that abductive reasoning alone is not enough to explain phenomena as complex systems in biological model construction. We assume that an interplay between abductive reasoning and systems thinking skills, such as cross-level reasoning (Tamir et al, 2023), is necessary for explaining biological phenomena as complex systems in model construction. This idea has also been proposed in the field of earth science education by Oh (2019Oh ( , 2022.…”

“…In addition to connecting causes and mechanisms on different organizational levels, the systems thinking literature suggests that further skills need to be applied to explain phenomena as a complex system. Among others, these skills also include developing complex mechanisms such as feedback loops or considering the system's change over time (Ben Zvi Assaraf and Knippels, 2022;Tamir et al, 2023). Future studies are needed to examine how cognitive processes of abductive reasoning, which we operationalized as the steps of abduction (Johnson and Krems, 2001), are related to further systems thinking skills.…”

“…Since only two participants (both of whom modeled the CFP) engaged in model application and received high complexity scores, our results might suggest that addressing high complexity in model construction could stunt the transition to model application. Explaining phenomena as complex systems in model construction and developing strategies to test these complex explanations in model application are difficult tasks that require the highest level of systems thinking skills (Ben Zvi Assaraf and Knippels, 2022;Tamir et al, 2023) and modeling competencies (Upmeier zu . Thus, it is not surprising that only two of the 18 participants explained their phenomenon as a complex system in model construction and developed strategies to test generated explanations in model application.…”

“…Thus, systems thinking skills are needed to explain biological phenomena as complex systems. Scholars have argued that modeling scaffolds learners in applying systems thinking skills by providing a focused representation of complex phenomena (Ben Zvi Assaraf and Knippels, 2022;Dauer et al, 2022;Tamir et al, 2023). This bridges representational modeling and systems thinking skills.…”