CREATE for STEM Institute
Speaker: Dr. Orit Ben-Zvi Assaraf,
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Title of Seminar: The Development of High School Students’ Understanding of
Complex Systems in Human Biology – A Longitudinal Study.
Abstract
The study characterized the development of our students’ system thinking by analyzing the concept maps they had created throughout their three years of high school biology education. Using the data analysis of the concept maps, we identified the extent to which the students understood the three central elements that characterize a system (hierarchy, homeostasis, dynamism), and analyze their understanding according to its place within the theoretical framework of the system thinking hierarchical model (STH). The data analysis of the concept maps showed that while the 67 individual students in our population constructed a variety of different models of the human body systems, these models did fall into a more limited set of recurring patterns.
Over their three years of participation in the study, the students had created multiple Repertory Grids (RG) while participating in semi-structured, group interviews. We adopted the CMP (Component-Mechanism-Phenomena) model for analyzing RG data. Our findings suggest that as the learning process progressed, systems complexity understanding was developed within each of the major CMP categories. Moreover, there was an increase in the mechanism complexity, manifested by more students describing mechanisms at the molecular level.
Bio
Orit Ben-Zvi Assaraf is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Science Education at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. Orit's work in science education focuses on environmental education, nature conservation and Cognitive-based research into system thinking in the fields of Biology, Ecology and Earth Sciences .
In addition, her research in informal learning environments is dealing with family learning in zoos and studying interactions and mediation processes in science museums.