Contemporary US and European approaches to ecosystems and mental health have left many feeling disempowered in the face of the climate crisis. This article advocates for holistic approaches to supporting natural complex systems with contemplation and care. It explores how environmental metaphors and nature-based art therapy can foster human-nature…

In this article we address two key questions in the application of dynamical systems theory (DST) to second language acquisition (SLA) that have not been resolved in recent debates about this issue. The first question relates to reductionism. Is an antireductionist position a necessary element of DST? We show that the radical antireductionist…

One hundred years ago, Paul Weiss and Ludwig von Bertalanffy independently proposed that living organisms interact with their environment through systems. In the century that has followed, systems thinking and modeling have grown in tandem with discovery of the vast complexity of the universe at microscopic through astronomic levels. As our…

The design of biological systems is a multidisciplinary activity in which biomedical engineers collaborate to build novel biological systems that address society's needs. One of the most relevant skills for designing biological systems is engineering systems thinking (EST). Among the EST elements, the EST cognitive competencies are comparatively…

Within the fields of learning design, instructional systems and educational psychology, cognitive load has been discussed and debated for a number of years. The impact of course designs on learning process is still questioned, and how we learn continues to be an intriguing question. The fields of working memory (WM) and cognitive load (CL) have…

System pausing at pre-determined positions during multimedia presentations can enhance multimedia learning. However, the pause positions are usually set up based on the structure of the learning material (e.g., segmentation principle) rather than on the complexity of its different sections (as determined by levels of element interactivity,…

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…

Engineering education aims to equip children with the skills to solve and apply complex problems. Problem-solving processes in engineering require high-level thinking and mind habits. Habit is a term used to describe various aspects of intelligence. Engineering habits of mind are the values, attitudes, and thinking skills associated with…

Over the past twenty-five years, or so, considerable advances have been made in understanding how learning occurs in the brain, though much of this research is still to make its way into education. One contribution it should be making is to furnish the philosophical critique of past and current theory with supporting empirical evidence. For…

Dual-process theories may be invoked to explain how physicians interact with, interpret, and draw inferences from clinical information. Stanovich and West's model articulates two kinds of thinking--intuitive-based System 1 and analytical-based System 2--which have been under-investigated with physicians in training. This qualitative study explored…

Several challenges faced by humanity, such as the world food problem, migration flows or climate change, are all taught about in geography courses worldwide. Behind these challenges are complex systems consisting of several interrelated causes and consequences. In order to better understand these highly complex geographical systems, a systems…

While AI has become more prevalent in our society than ever, many young learners are found holding various naive, erroneous conceptions of AI due to the influence of their technology and media environments. To address this issue, this study seeks to propose a novel pedagogical solution to improve upper-elementary school students' scientific…

Present and future social and ecological challenges are complex both to understand and to attempt to solve. To comprehend the complex systems underlying these issues, students need systems thinking skills. However, in science education, a uniform delineation of systems thinking across contexts has yet to be established. While there seems to be…

Stocks and flows (SF) are building blocks of dynamic systems: Stocks change through inflows and outflows, such as our bank balance changing with withdrawals and deposits, or atmospheric CO[subscript 2] with absorptions and emissions. However, people make systematic errors when trying to infer the behavior of dynamic systems, termed SF failure,…

Willingness to communicate (WTC) research has recently witnessed a paradigm shift with the more recent studies looking at the shifting and dynamic nature of the variable. A growing body of literature has interpreted such dynamicity from a complex dynamic systems (CDS) perspective. The theory of CDS has four basic properties, one of which, and the…