Summary
The paper describes a study of how middle school students and teachers think about everyday settings involving feedback, stocks and flows, time delays and nonlinearities, prior to any formal training in these concepts. It is organized into four parts: (1) a review of the literature on children’s and adults’ understanding about complex systems; (2) a description of the development and testing of the “Systems-Based Inquiry” (S-BI) method and protocol; (3) a description of the S-BI method testing in the schools and its results; and (4) a discussion of the results, consideration of limitations, and suggestions for extensions and refinements.
The literature review indicated that even highly educated adults have poor systems thinking skills. Two contrasting explanations were found. The first argues that systems thinking does not develop “naturally” as the language, but must be developed through formal education, like calculus. According to this view, schools need to introduce systems concepts into their curriculum. The second argues that children are natural systems thinkers who can recognize interdependencies and interrelationships long before they are introduced in these concepts in school. While the world around them grows increasingly complex and interdependent, schools continue to fragment and compartmentalize, reinforcing the notion that knowledge is made up of many unrelated parts and providing little opportunity for students to see recurring patterns of behavior across subjects and disciplines. Based on this view, formal education suppresses children’s natural inclination to think about systems and more radical reforms are needed. Therefore, a question rises: Does current schooling fail to develop people’s intuitive systems thinking capabilities or does it actively suppress them? And consequently, what should be done, and what curriculum materials, pedagogical reforms, and other changes can help?
To answer these questions, authors developed instruments that elicit student and teacher understanding of key systems concepts, and tested them with a sample of participants from two middle schools in the U.S.A. They examined participants’ naïve “systems intelligence”, which is defined as a layperson’s understanding of how dynamic systems function prior to any formal education in such concepts. Systems intelligence combines conceptual knowledge (knowledge of system properties, structures and reoccurring patterns of behavior) and reasoning skills (the ability to locate situations in wider contexts, see multiple levels of perspective within a system, trace complex interrelationships, look for endogenous or “within system” influences, be aware of changing behavior over time, and recognize “homologies”—recurring patterns that exist within a wide variety of systems). Based on many definitions of systems thinking, authors assessed participants’ abilities to (i) recognize recurrent patterns of behavior in different domains, (ii) distinguish types of system structures, and (iii) make relevant policy recommendations.
Authors found, with some exceptions, generally limited intuitive systems thinking abilities. “Open-loop” or one-way causal thinking was common. Explanations lacked references to time horizons and time delays. Significant misconceptions of stock and flow structures appeared regardless of age. Therefore, this study shoedn that people tend to focus on one-way causal structures when more complex “interaction patterns” exist. Without systems-specific content knowledge, individuals appear to focus on descriptive, surface features. An explanation for why students misunderstand complex dynamic concepts may be their focus on an object’s actions rather than its interactions. Another possible explanation for the lack of feedback recognition may be found in participants’ use of terms such as “cycle” and “chain”. The multiple and ambiguous meanings of “cycle” show it is a poor substitute for the term “feedback”. The caution here is that various “cycle models” may persist in the minds of students and may be misapplied. Thus, authors propose educators to look closely at current curricular materials to identify existing topics that may act as building blocks for learning systems concepts (e.g., cycle to feedback loops), and to ensure that they are not counter-productive in developing systems thinking.
Furthermore, this study indicated that teachers generally outperformed students, although one-quarter of the students performed at the median level for teachers. Several reasons unrelated to teachers understanding of systems or the formal education they have received were proposed. For example, teachers were likely more comfortable with and more adept at the interview process. A synthesis of this study’s findings with what is known about the development of higher-order reasoning skills, along with the action research conducted by system dynamics educators, suggests that middle-school students can intuitively understand systems concepts. Results show generally weak understanding of these concepts, but also show considerable variance in the abilities of both students and teachers, with some students outperforming some teachers. Authors raise concerns about the degree to which ordinary discourse, educational materials, and common teaching methods may encourage and support sloppy and incomplete thinking about complex systems.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The paper deals with “systems thinking” and “complex systems”.
Systems thinking is widely considered essential in the effective management of complex dynamic systems at the core of problems such as poverty, environmental degradation, and climate change. Therefore, in the 21st century, many countries around the world have been integrating systems thinking and dynamic modeling into the curriculum and aligning systems thinking concepts and tools with state standards.
