DOI
https://doi.org/10.1039/C9RP00070D

Summary
Through the lens of systems thinking, this paper describes a study of investigating the challenging characteristics of systems thinking encountered by students exploring the topic of gas laws that can provide fresh insight into effective teaching strategies to promote student chemistry problem-solving capability. Particularly, this study explores how undergraduate students connect and translate their conceptual representations when they are involved in contextualized problem-solving (CPS). The CPS assessment instrument contains four open-ended questions about gas laws.
To examine students’ systems thinking levels of CPS, authors followed three hierarchical characteristics of scoring schemes: (1) retrieving essential science concepts embedded in all components of a whole system by identifying important components included in each problem context and making distinctions as to what subsystems (e.g., internal and external systems) are included in a whole system; (2) organizing the relationships among scientific concepts and subsystems by identifying the intraspecific relationship in each subsystem (e.g., the height of water in a container has its own pressure inside the system, or there is external atmospheric pressure outside of the container) and indicating dynamic or interdependent relationships among the science concepts within each subsystem (e.g., PV = constant in a closed subsystem); (3) identifying hidden dimensions and limitations of a whole system and making generalizations by both recognition of patterns or interrelationships among subsystems which are not necessarily readily apparent, and awareness of the requirements and restrictions in each problem context (e.g., closed system, fixed volume etc.).
The results showed that only 8% of students were capable of higher order systems thinking ability when they engaged in contextualized problem solving. Over half of the students failed to retrieve essential concepts in problem situations. Most of the participants demonstrated difficulties in organizing related systems’ components, understanding the cyclic nature of relationships among systems, and identifying limitations in a specific problem context. By identifying the difficulties and challenges of systems thinking experienced by undergraduate students in solving complex chemistry problems, the potential of these findings to provide fresh insights into effective teaching strategies to promote students’ higher order thinking skills is demonstrated.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The paper deals with systems thinking.
Systems thinking is viewed as a viable approach to convey not only the understanding of different components and processes of any system, but also how each of the components and processes affect other components and processes. Systems thinking is defined as the ability to deeply understand and interpret systems’ characteristics and behaviour. A systems thinker can identify systems’ components, recognising the relationships among them, exploring and understanding emergent properties of the components, and analyzing and synthesizing phenomena in a wider context.

Point of Strength
The strength of the publication is the simultaneous collection of quantitative and qualitative data which demonstrate that even capable undergraduate students might still be under-developed in terms of systems thinking skills.