Investigating Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education: Students’ and Educators’ Experiences and Perspectives

Abstract

Chemistry knowledge is essential in addressing solutions to complex global challenges such as achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs), which include climate action, good health and well-being, and quality education. However, chemistry knowledge is often taught in silos of individual topics to achieve a depth of understanding, placing less emphasis on making connections to other disciplines or global issues. Calls have been made to reimagine how chemistry is taught so that citizens and chemists can contribute to solutions to these complex global challenges. Researchers and educators have been exploring systems thinking (ST), which has been proposed as part of an approach to chemistry education. ST aims to understand and interpret complex problems from a holistic perspective. ST has a goal to better equip citizens and future scientists for the interdisciplinary work needed to address these emerging global issues. However, there has been limited evidence-based research on what ST looks like or its impact on chemistry education. Without evidence, uncertainty will persist on how to effectively implement ST in chemistry education and wide-spread implementation will remain a challenge, limiting the ability to equip people with the knowledge and skills to understand and solve these global challenges. My doctoral thesis has contributed to this area of need by investigating students’ and educators’ perspectives and experiences of ST approaches in chemistry education. We found 56 chemistry educators’ willingness and ability to implement ST in chemistry education is influenced by their knowledge, beliefs, experiences, contextual and personal factors (Chapter 2). Additionally, barriers related to educators’ knowledge on ST and contextual factors (e.g., limited time to learn and teach ST, limited teaching resources and assessments) were rated the highest among educators. This work can guide priorities for educational change efforts to reduce barriers for implementing ST in chemistry education. In addition to learning about educators’ perspectives and experiences with ST in chemistry education, we investigated students’ perspectives and experiences when engaging in ST tasks, as they are also key stakeholders who must be considered when implementing ST. We created a ST intervention in which 26 undergraduate and graduate students, taking chemistry courses, engaged in three ST tasks and interviews. We identified ST skills that these students do and do not demonstrate readily, to understand which skills need to be explicitly scaffolded in their instruction (Chapter 3). While most students demonstrated most of the 11 ST skills assessed, some aspects of the skills were demonstrated less frequently, drawing attention to areas that need to be explicitly taught and scaffolded. The aspects demonstrated less frequently in students’ systems maps include: (1) fewer concepts and connections at submicroscopic levels of granularity (e.g., molecular, atomic, subatomic), (2) limited circular loops and causal connections, and (3) no connections that considered human impact on chemistry. This work was one of the first that provided some understanding of how to assess ST skills in chemistry education. The research in Chapter 4 explored students’ experiences more broadly by looking at their engagement with individual and collaborative ST tasks during the intervention and identifying aspects of ST that may be beneficial and challenging for students. Students shared more positive than negative experiences with the ST tasks. One beneficial experience was recognizing and appreciating different perspectives and ideas from their group members, bringing attention to important implications related to equity, diversity, and inclusion in chemistry education. We also found that students had varying positive perspectives based on their engagement with the ST tasks and their perspectives of other students engaging with ST in a chemistry course. Implications of this work include specific recommendations on how to approach ST instruction for chemistry teaching and learning. These recommendations were considered in the design of a new ST study to investigate the impact of using a ST approach to support the evaluation of scientific misinformation (Chapter 5). In addition to the chemistry education research in Chapters 2 to 4, my doctoral degree focused on curriculum development by using some of these research findings to inform the development of a ST framework, helping educators to plan, implement, and assess ST in chemistry education (Chapter 6). We have made significant contributions to areas of ST that had not been previously explored, creating momentum for future research on ST in chemistry education. There are still many research opportunities on ST needed to explore cognitive and affective outcomes as well as EDI and long-term transfer of knowledge and skills in chemistry. Our research has helped identified what ST looks like in chemistry education, now educators and researchers can use this knowledge to investigate how ST approaches impact the field.