From Components to Phenomena: How Junior High School Students Develop Systems Thinking about Climate Change in the Biosphere
Prof. Orit Ben Zvi Assaraf, School of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
Climate change is a complex socio-ecological system whose behavior emerges from dynamic interactions among physical, biological, and human entities operating across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Within the biosphere, these interactions involve coupled processes linking vegetation, soils, organisms, and biogeochemical cycles. Accordingly, understanding climate change requires systems thinking—the ability to explain complex, dynamic systems by explicitly attending to boundaries, interactions, feedback mechanisms, and emergent phenomena. This study examined how students’ systems thinking about climate change in the biosphere developed across a scaffolded instructional sequence in an advanced junior-high school science and technology course. The learning unit “Where Should Trees Be Planted in my Community?” focuses on Israel’s Mediterranean woodland ecosystem and enables students to examine dynamic interactions between biospheric processes and climate within the carbon cycle. We analyzed paired pre/post concept maps from 86 students using the Components–Mechanisms–Phenomena (CMP) framework, which conceptualizes systems thinking as progressing from identifying system components to articulating causal mechanisms and explaining emergent patterns and system-level phenomena. Results indicated clear structural growth, reflected in increases in the number of concepts, connections, and junctions, alongside greater representation of micro-level entities, processes, systems, and phenomena. CMP shifts suggested growth in mechanistic reasoning and some increase in phenomenon-oriented explanations; however, multi-step causal sequencing remained a cognitive barrier, and phenomenon-level links were relatively rare.
Where
Huygensbuilding, HG02.053
