Preliminary Evidence of Systems Thinking Skills in Gamelan-Based Ethnoscience Booklet-Integrated Collaborative Problem Solving

Students’ systems thinking skills (STS) can be difficult to develop when science learning provides limited opportunities to connect relationships among system components with contextual phenomena. Integrating local wisdom into learning materials, such as a gamelan-based ethnoscience booklet, may provide a meaningful context for developing these skills. This study aimed to compare students’ STS performance, adjusted for pretest scores, between a class receiving Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) instruction integrated with a gamelan-based ethnoscience booklet and a class receiving CPS instruction alone. This quantitative study employed a pretest–posttest control group design with class-level random allocation of treatment and involved 56 Grade VIII students from two classes, with 28 students in each class. STS data were collected through pretest and posttest assessments and analyzed using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), with pretest scores included as the covariate. The results showed that the adjusted mean posttest STS score was higher in the experimental class (55.562) than in the control class (48.616), representing a difference of 6.946 points (p = .002). These findings provide preliminary evidence that integrating a gamelan-based ethnoscience booklet into CPS instruction is associated with higher posttest STS performance than CPS instruction alone after accounting for students’ initial STS scores.