Investigating middle school science teachers’ stock-flow, causal-loop, and dynamic thinking skills with scenario-based questions

In recent years, the world has been facing many serious and complex problems, such as climate change, clean energy, and health problems. More comprehensive, holistic, and interdisciplinary approaches are needed to address such complex and global problems. The systems thinking approach in education provides a holistic approach that focuses on the interactions and relationships among components within complex systems at different levels. This study aims to investigate the systems thinking skills of science teachers using three scenario-based questions related to stock-flow thinking, causal-loop thinking, and dynamic thinking skills. The eight middle school science teachers were the participants of the study. Data were collected through online interviews, the qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the data. The results showed that teachers had varying levels of ability to think in terms of stock flows, to think dynamically, and to think in terms of causal loops in the context of domain-general scenario-based questions. The results of the study suggest that the systems thinking and system dynamics approach inherent in science education can be incorporated into teacher training curricula and workshops to improve teachers’ systems thinking skills.