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Abstract As future decision-makers, students must develop interdisciplinary, systems thinking skills to make effective management decisions; however, systems thinking remains challenging for many students. Here, we use the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus as a framework to examine how drawings can help students cultivate systems thinking skills. Drawings can be tools to make implicit mental models of systems connections explicit for instructors to better comprehend student learning. Our goal was to understand how drawing can help students make connections across systems compared to using only verbal explanations. In 2021, we interviewed undergraduates, asking them to draw and verbally explain the FEW Nexus. Analysis revealed that student drawings showed an increase in the number of connections that half of students could describe when compared to verbal-only explanations. Instructors may benefit from this study by recognizing areas where students might struggle to understand FEW Nexus connections, where additional course emphasis is needed, and how drawings can help assess student learning.
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Drawing and Talk Reveal Dynamic Shifts in Students' Developing Knowledge of Complex Systems
Abstract: Complex systems pose learning challenges because students must coordinate individual entities with their aggregate system properties. We sought to better understand this challenge by assessing students’ drawings and speech after they learned with a computational environment (NetLogo). We assessed how students represented their knowledge of complex systems and found that students transitioned from describing key entities in speech to representing both entities and their physical properties in their drawings.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2202468
- PAR ID:
- 10537146
- Editor(s):
- NA
- Publisher / Repository:
- ISLS
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2123 to 2124
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Drawing Complex Systems NetLogo
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.22318
