Measuring Individuals’ Systems Thinking Skills through the Development of an Immersive Virtual Reality Complex System Scenarios

Abstract

and a visiting professor working with the Institute for Systems Engineering Research/MSU/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Dr. Jaradat received a PhD in Engineering Management and Systems Engineering from Old Dominion University in 2014. His main research interests include systems engineering and management systems, systems thinking and complex system exploration, system of systems, virtual reality and complex systems, systems simulation, risk, reliability and vulnerability in critical infrastructures with applications to diverse fields ranging from the military to industry. His publications appeared in several ranking journals including the IEEE Systems Journal, and the Computers & Industrial Engineering Journal. His total awarded projects exceed $ 4.2 M including National Science Foundation

Systems thinking assessments in engineering: A systematic literature review

“…For example, Jaradat and Castelle's Assessment included the creation of a systems thinking profile that “established individuals' predisposition to adapt a systemic perspective” based on their responses to 39 questions linked to a given scenario (Castelle & Jaradat, 2016, p. 83). Jaradat, Hamilton, Dayarathna, et al's Assessment used a virtual reality (VR) gaming format to map participant choices in the game to a subset of questionnaire selections in Jaradat and Castelle's Assessment (Jaradat et al, 2019).…”

“…One assessment, by Jaradat et al (2019, sec. Abstract), used a virtual reality (VR) gaming scenario to measure “how students react to situations and manage uncertainty.” Participants wore a VR headset and used touch controllers to complete retail store tasks in an immersive setting.…”

“…Common themes also included focusing on system elements, which generally referred to aspects of a system's identity or what composed the system (e.g., system parts or physical or informational objects) and the relationships between system elements (Benninghaus et al, 2019b;Brandstädter et al, 2012;Gray et al, 2019;Lavi et al, 2020). Time-related or temporal considerations were also seen across a few systems thinking definitions (Booth Sweeney & Sterman, 2000;Brandstädter et al, 2012;Jaradat et al, 2019). Some definitions presented systems thinking at a more general level, including as a higher-order cognitive skill (Zoller & Scholz, 2004), as a metacognitive strategy (Grohs et al, 2018), or as the characteristics of an individual demonstrated while solving complex problems (Jaradat, 2014).…”

“…Note: Assessments are listed from most recent publication to oldest based the most recent publication date of each assessment's source paper(s). of a system Castelle & Jaradat, 2016;Frank, 2007Frank, , 2009Frank, , 2010Frank & Kordova, 2015;Jaradat, 2014;Jaradat et al, 2019), for example, "interconnections and mutual influences between the main tasks and the peripheral task' (Camelia & Ferris, 2018, p. 577;Camelia et al, 2018, p. 119). Within Group 2, another common theme (four of five) was recognizing the importance of factors that push beyond a traditionally narrow technical focus within engineering, such as managerial considerations and customer needs (Frank, 2010), so-called 'engineering and non-engineering consequences" (Camelia & Ferris, 2018, p. 577;Camelia et al, 2018, p. 119), "nontechnical issues" (Jaradat, 2014, p. 264), and political, social, and environmental responsibilities Hadgraft et al, 2008).…”

Systems Thinking: A Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…For example, several studies focused on the general systems thinking paradigm [5,[24][25][26][27][28][29]. Other scholars provided a comprehensive review on different aspects of systems thinking in different fields such as the healthcare sector [30][31][32][33][34][35], sustainability [36][37][38][39][40], smart cities [41], human resource management [42,43], education [44][45][46][47][48][49][50], general practice [51], individual differences and personality [52], lean [53], digital skills [54], gender studies [55], virtual reality [56] and systems engineering/system of systems [6,57,58]. Other studies have attempted to link the concept of systems thinking to cognitive intelligence by using different terminologies such as mental maps, meta-learning, structural thinking, cognitive belief and mindset, which are all embodied in the concept of cognition [59][60][61][62][63].…”