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…

Feedback loop reasoning is an essential part of systems thinking, which includes the analysis and description of system behaviour and regulative measures. In feedback loops, every change can simultaneously represent a cause and an effect. Research on reasoning in feedback loops is limited to investigating students' existing mental models. This…

A new vision set forth by the "Framework for K-12 Science Education" (National Research Council, 2012) highlights the importance of developing students' abilities to think about systems as opposed to isolated facts. However, little evidence exists on how to foster students' conceptualization of systems. It has been argued that…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of the conventional high school instruction about conservation of mechanical energy in Canton Sarajevo. To that end we tested 441 high school students from six different schools in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) for their competence to apply the law of conservation of mechanical energy.…

This article describes two lessons within the authors' education module entitled, Ecological Networks, that successfully teaches introductory systems content to middle and high school students. To catch students' attention when teaching these new concepts, they decided to use a network that was familiar and fun for students--a cell-phone…