Evaluation of the middle school students’ understanding level of basic system concepts

Abstract

System dynamics is a well formulated methodology for analyzing a system that
includes cause-effect relationships, their underlying logic, time delays, and feedback loops. The
method initially emerged in the business and industrial applications, but now it is increasingly
being used in many other disciplines. Having been inspired by successful policy changes in many
fields, the system dynamics researchers targeted to apply the system dynamics approach in the
educational field too. The first aim of this study is to teach system concepts such as stocks, flows
and causal relationships to secondary school students and to evaluate the competence of the
students’ understanding capacity depending on their grade level. Another aim of this study is to
determine the problems encountered by middle school students in learning system components.
The system components were taught in six lesson hours by using four different scenarios. For each
scenario, students modeled the system explained in the story using Stella software, and tested their
models. In this study, a non-experimental quantitative research design was applied. The data were
based on unstructured interviews and observations of the researcher. The conclusion of the study is
that components of system dynamics can be communicated to middle school students in six lesson
hours.