Understanding the world around us is a growing necessity for the whole public, as citizens are required to make informed decisions in their everyday lives about complex issues. Systems thinking (ST) is a promising approach for developing solutions to various problems that society faces and has been acknowledged as a crosscutting concept that…

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) serves as a key accelerator for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emphasizing systems thinking as an essential competency that must be cultivated in the learning process. This study investigates students' systems thinking skills within the ESD framework through assessments on…

The authors describe Hexacago Health Academy (HHA) 2.0, a five-year summer intervention designed to increase interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) among mostly Black high school students in Chicago. The program features public health fundamentals and game design using principles of systems thinking, social-cognitive…

Explanation of natural phenomena at one level of biological organisation almost always involves causes that are found at other levels. Although scientists thinking across levels find it easy to explain physiological phenomena, students often perceive this as a challenge. We developed a new graphic organiser called Zoom Map, which is a mode for…

High school students need to be introduced to and trained in system thinking skills as one of the implementations of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This study aimed to develop high school students' systems thinking skills through ESD-laden project-based learning on environmental change material. A pre-experimental method was applied…

Objective: Systems thinking can be counterintuitive to everyday ways of knowing. This can surface doubt around predicted patterns of emergence in complex systems data, especially as it relates to the current climate crisis and related justice-oriented solutions. Method: Our study describes a four-year design-based research project in which we…

This paper addresses the question of why young Australians with intellectual disability (ID) remain underrepresented in open employment despite significant investment by various stakeholders. It uses the analogy of Whack-a-Mole (an arcade game) to draw attention to the complexity young people face during transition, and to illustrate how…

Understanding homeostasis is a goal of biology education curricula, as homeostasis is a core feature of living systems. Identifying and understanding the underlying molecular feedback mechanisms appear to be challenging for students. Understanding the properties and mechanisms of such complex homeostatic systems requires feedback loop reasoning,…

The systems thinking approach requires understanding and interpreting complex systems. This review investigated how the systems thinking approach in science education is positioned in peer-reviewed empirical research articles and to identify the trends used in the current literature. A systematic review of open-access, empirical peer-reviewed…

The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes globally is at an all-time high, with some granted permanent residence and resettlement in countries like Australia. Students from refugee backgrounds attend Australian schools and how schools respond to their educational needs is increasingly a focus for research, school practice and policy…

This report describes a study of three English teachers' and three students' participation in two high school environment clubs. Teachers' and students' interview perceptions were analyzed based a critical inquiry systems thinking framework involving inferences of purposes, outcomes, norms, and beliefs/discourses constituting…

One core feature of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS) is a systems-level teaming process for coordinating staff implementation of evidence-based practices and monitoring student progress across all three tiers. Prior research has shown schools that report regular teaming and team-based data use are more likely to successfully…

Although the internationalization of the U.S. education sector is perhaps the most salient at the postsecondary level, U.S. secondary schools have increasingly experienced the effects of globalization. In recent years, these schools have witnessed a surge in their population of international students. However, there is relatively little…

Efforts to support Spanish teachers are critical to the sustainability of K-12 WL programs. In the U.S. South, administrators struggle to fill school vacancies, and teachers report the highest levels of dissatisfaction. WL teachers specifically in this region of the country face additional hardships: teaching disengaged learners, challenging…

Developing students' ability to think about systems, as opposed to isolated facts, is of central importance in much of science teaching. Prior work in this area has focused on students' recognition of the processes occurring within a system. Comparatively, little work has been done on how students organise the objects that are contained within the…