DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/su7044474

Summary
The article focuses on the “sustainability thinking” (SEfST) educational approach, that is, the transition from teaching to “know” to learning to “think”. The authors describe the perspective of this approach in the disciplines related to science, engineering, mathematics, technology, environmental education. The transition is related to the development of sustainability and therefore close-to-real-life inter/cross/trans-disciplinary problems used in the education process. The approach is analyzed in the context of science, technology, environment, society, economics, and policy (STESEP) education. The provided conceptual model of higher-order cognitive skills helps to identify the place of sustainability thinking with respect to the other approaches. The authors list the main goals of sustainability thinking, such as recognizing problems, collecting relevant information, making decision, taking responsibility, and others. The research on sustainability thinking, evaluative thinking, and decision-making competencies was performed for the secondary school students in Israel. The results showed that the sustainability thinking approach has not been employed enough yet. Thus, several research-based strategies to promote it are listed. For example, teachers are encouraged to assign homework problems that require higher-order cognitive skills, include self-assessment and self-study activities.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The approach of sustainable thinking should prepare the students to become sustainability- and socially responsible citizens. The sustainable thinking requires higher-order cognitive skills which include question asking, problem solving, decision making, critical, evaluative, system thinking. This leads to the idea that students should learn to deal with complex systems and using interdisciplinary knowledge to create not only technologically feasible products, but also economic and socially feasible products with consideration of social and moral aspects. The authors also state that the teaching strategy should be changed from the conventional teacher-centered, authoritative methods to student-centered teaching with real-world tasks and group work. The authors conclude the problem that the transition from the disciplinary algorithmic-exercise solving paradigm which develops lower-order cognitive skills to the interdisciplinary higher-order cognitive skill is slow in the science, technology and engineering teaching.

Point of Strength
The article presents the idea of sustainable thinking, that is the transformation from learning to “know” to learning to “think”. This transformation includes developing skills required for system thinking, problem solving and dealing with open complex systems, creative thinking , etc. In other words, in order to achieve the goal of sustainability, the education needs to be redirected from learning the facts to developing higher-order cognitive skills. The changes in teaching, assessment and learning strategies from conventional knowledge-based to interdisciplinary guided learning are also defined.