Teaching complex systems

Earlier in section 2.2.3, it has been established that it is also important to look at teachers’ instructional practices, besides what they know, in understanding the educational problem of students’ limited awareness in complex systems. This section is a review of the literature on teaching complex systems in school science.

Several studies have examined the development of instructional resources, curricula and strategies aimed at facilitating teaching of complex systems and most have reported successes to varying degrees (e.g., d’Apollonia et al., 2004; Bravo-Torija & Jimenez-Aleixandre, 2012; Klopfer, Yoon & Um, 2005; Levy & Wilensky, 2009; Randler & Bogner, 2009; Yoon, 2008; Yoon et al., 2013). Some researchers describe the efficacy of teaching and learning systems from a complex systems approach. For instance, Yoon (2008) illustrated how an instructional heuristic based on a complex systems evolutionary approach to harness the complexity inherent in the learning system of the classroom improved student knowledge of a complex socio-scientific issue. This approach requires the teacher to facilitate through individual and group activities

38 involving opinion-forming, argumentation, risks-benefits assessment, group negotiation and sharing of opinions on genetic engineering dilemmas. She demonstrated that student rationales concerning the complex issue showed increases in their understanding of complex systems ideas over time. In another study on river ecosystem, Hoffer and her team (2011) introduced a computer simulation program SimRiver which allowed students to develop a river basin as a complex system with numerous variables. With the help of a teacher, the students were able to identify human activities affecting producers in the ecosystem. The researchers contested that through this teacher-facilitated simulation, the students developed a skill set for understanding nonlinear problems where the relationships involved were not simple cause-and-effect.

Other researchers talk about the various strategies involving the use of computer technologies that can be used to teach complex scientific systems. For example, Greene & Azevedo (2009) detailed how their middle and high school students acquired a sophisticated mental model of a complex biological system in a hypermedia learning environment when their teachers guided their self-regulated learning through planning and monitoring of strategies, and handling of task difficulty and demands. In another study involving an agent-based modeling program, NetLogo, to model the micro-rules underlying the phenomena of wolf-sheep predation and synchronized flashing of fireflies, Wilensky and Reisman (2006) described how teachers guided students in the investigation of the connections between different biological levels and observation of the resultant aggregate dynamics of such systems. More recently, Yoon, Klopfer and team (2013) also described how their intervention of using StarLogo TNG – an agent-

39 based modeling program – and other cognitively-rich activities might have helped in improving their teacher-participants’ instruction in biological complex systems. Another research team even looked at a college teacher’s use of a course wiki to harness the self- organized learning dynamics of young adults to learn about complex systems (May, Burgard & Abbasi, 2010).

Instructional strategies that use less technological tools to improve student learning of complex systems have also been developed and tested. For instance, Reinfried, Aeschbacher and Rottermann (2012) investigated a curricular unit of the complex concept of greenhouse effect, and illustrated how active and engaged learning could be promoted with instructional activities to facilitate deep conceptual understanding of greenhouse effect. This strategy began with the teacher introducing a problem to elicit students’ prior knowledge and preconceptions. The various complex intertwining processes within greenhouse effect were then untangled and presented in a temporal succession by the teacher, who then linked up the processes in a step-wise fashion. In a separate quasi-experimental study with five German teachers in ten 8th and 9th grade science classrooms, Randler and Bogner (2009) compared an instructional unit on ecology that incorporated inquiry activities, hands-on experiments, field work and cooperative learning strategies, with a traditional teaching unit that involved only worksheets, textbooks and predominantly teacher talk. They concluded that students subjected to the intervention performed better in post- and delayed post-tests on ecological content.

40 The review on instruction of complex systems uncovered an interesting gap. Despite the numerous novel interventions offering fruitful insights into improving the instruction and learning of complex systems, there has been no study that looks at what and how complex systems ideas are actually taught in regular science instruction. This is disappointing because as explained in the introductory chapter, these ideas are cross- cutting concepts applicable in many science topics and are core in facilitating the understanding of diverse scientific systems. Investigating the instruction of complex systems ideas in typical science classrooms can present a baseline picture of the state of complex systems instruction in school science and identify areas for improvement. Moreover, the existing studies do not consider the relationship between teachers’ understanding and their instructional practices. There is an implicit assumption in the existing studies that teachers already possess an adequate understanding of complex systems. However, as suggested in section 2.2.3, it will be prudent to establish if this relationship is true in the subject matter of complex systems.

To conclude, the review on the teaching of complex systems reveals that existing research has focused on the enactment of innovative interventions to improve student learning of complex systems, phenomena and issues. However, research related to the instruction of complex systems ideas in regular science teaching is oddly non-existential. Questions such as are complex systems ideas taught in regular science classrooms, to what extent are the ideas conveyed, and what relationship exists between teachers’ complex systems understanding and their instructional practices, present an important

41 angle in appreciating and addressing the educational problem of students’ limited awareness in complex systems.