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…

The complex topic of global climate change continues to be a challenging yet important topic among science educators and researchers. This mixed methods study adds to the growing research by investigating student conceptions of climate change from a system theory perspective (Von Bertalanffy, 1968) by asking the question, "How do differences…