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

Hasret NUHOĞLU

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.

Key words: System thinking, System dynamics, Stella software, teaching and learning methods

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