Identifying Chemistry Students’ Baseline Systems Thinking Skills When Constructing System Maps for a Topic on Climate Change

Abstract

New resources have recently been emerging for educators to implement systems thinking (ST) in chemistry education, including a proposed set of ST skills. While these efforts aim to make ST implementation easier, little is known about how to assess these skills in a chemistry context. In this study, we investigated ST skills employed by students who constructed system maps of a topic related to climate change. Eighteen undergraduate chemistry students from first- to third-year participated in this study. We designed and implemented a ST intervention to capture how students engaged with three ST tasks, performed individually and collaboratively. In our analysis, we focused on 11 ST skills that aligned with five characteristics proposed in a recent study. We found that participants demonstrated most of these ST skills when engaging with the ST tasks, with nuances. Participants’ system maps: (1) lacked concepts and connections at the submicroscopic level, (2) included multiple types of connections but few circular loops and causal connections, (3) lacked causal reasoning, although participants did predict how their system maps changed over time, (4) demonstrated the breadth of connections but did not describe human connections to the underlying chemistry of climate change topics. These findings identify aspects of ST where chemistry educators need to place emphasis when teaching ST skills to chemistry students and when guiding learning activities and other assessments. Using our findings, we created an adaptable ST rubric for the chemistry community as a tool for assessing ST skills.

Analysis of Climate Change in General Chemistry Textbooks

“…Climate change education is an important tool in generating an informed society that prepares communities to face climate challenges . Few resources exist that incorporate chemistry and climate change as well as materials that aid in the inclusion of systems thinking in chemical education. , Instructors who do enact systems thinking in their teaching practice are limited in their implementation due to lacking explicit scaffolding to connect more complex topics, such as the human factor in chemical processes . Educational materials, such as textbooks, can play an integral role in the manner and style of how chemistry topics are addressed in a course.…”

A Framework for the Integration of Green and Sustainable Chemistry into the Undergraduate Curriculum: Greening Our Practice with Scientific and Engineering Practices

“…As noted in the introduction, many phenomena on the green and sustainable chemistry wish list include those of global importance, such as the UN SDGs, or a desire for students to be able to map out the intersecting systems of scientific enterprise, sociopolitical context, and the larger ecosystem. ,, These systems are many scalar levels above the atomic-molecular behavior and macroscopic indicators of a chemical reaction that chemists normally focus on in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. One way of visualizing these systems at different scalar levels is in Figure , based on a figure from David Constable-Chichester from the American Chemical Society (ACS) Green Chemistry Institute (GCI), which outlines a series of system scales at various grain sizes from complex Earth systems down to the atomic/molecular-level.…”

“…These three lowest levels (subatomic, atomicmolecular, and laboratory) comprise systems levels that are familiar to chemistry educators from the initial work of Johnstone, 90 who noted that chemistry students struggle to connect their budding conceptions of atomic/molecular behavior with symbolic representations and the macroscopic effects witnessed on the laboratory bench. This difficulty was most recently noted in Szozda et al 36 Given that even these smaller more familiar scales of systems levels present real learning barriers for students, great care must be taken to help students connect the complexity of larger system presented to the underlying chemistry. In this project, our stepwise approach (as briefly described below) is intended to gradually increase the complexity of the phenomenon while also scaffolding the ways in which students are explicitly asked to make green(er) decisions based on their understanding of the chemistry underpinning these sustainability issues.…”

“…29,31,32 Since this curriculum design project has begun, researchers have identified systems thinking skills for the undergraduate curriculum, although these tasks require explicit prompting to engage students at scalar levels below the macroscopic. 36,37 While these initiatives represent big-picture ideals and are aligned with the core competencies proposed by MacKellar et al, 38 less is known about how to enact these ideas within a curriculum and collect evidence from assessment tasks about what students know and can do with their green chemistry knowledge. 2,39,40 Sustainability and Systems Thinking are often shown as macroscopic level phenomena, as they involve observable and measurable problems in the real world, yet little is known about how to effectively connect the molecular-level basis of chemical phenomena to these large-scale systems.…”

“…Although examples of prompting students with big-picture Earth systems and sustainability are present in fields such as Earth Science education, 22,41−47 in 2019 the few examples in chemistry education motivated us to create tasks to help students connect these systems to chemistry ideas in ways that support student use of scientific and engineering practices and disciplinary core ideas. 48,49 Furthermore, large-scale Systems Thinking representations and performances are reflective of expert behavior, requiring a specific focus on the connectivity of existing chemistry knowledge to provide a coherent understanding of the sustainability phenomena of interest.…”