Subject: system thinking

Posted by Linda Booth Sweeney on 7/25/2005
In Reply To:system thinking Posted by Richard Turnock on 7/14/2005

Message:

Hello Nooshin,

A few thoughts for you:

At the Bergen International System Dynamics Conference in 2001, John Sterman and I gave a talk entitled "Bathtub Dynamics". This paper, and a later paper entitled "Cloudy Skies: Assessing Public Understanding of Global Warming"
provide several pencil and paper exercises to assess understanding of stock/flow structures. See: http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/ to download these papers, including the exercises and coding guides. That talk inspired some teachers to repeat our experiments to test different populations on the system dynamics concepts inherent in the bathtub exercise. One such test was reported on at the ISD conference in Palermo by Guenther Ossimitz and Daniel Kainz.

At a 2003 ISD conference, a group of educators who used the Bathtub Dynamics exercise in their classrooms (ranging from middle school through
college)
gathered to share their results. The discussion covered:
1. Methodology for using this activity and data gathering 2. Usability of this activity at various age levels.
3. The ability to teach these concepts at various levels.
4. The implications for future teaching and learning.

The educators who participated included (if my memory serves me
correctly):
Portland, OR:
Ron Zaraza (Portland OR middle and high school)
Diana Fisher (High school)
Tim Joy (9th graders from DeLaSalle, an inner city school)

Carlisle, MA ( Alan Ticotsky and Rob Quaden- middle school)
Chelmsford, MA (Janan Hamm, middle school)
Ottawa, Ontario (Gordon Kubanek, high school)
Vermont Common School (Jeff Potash & John Heinbokel middle high
school)
Rampo College, NJ ( Rich Langheim, college)
WPI (Jim and Deb Lyneis, college)
Chittenden South SD ( Will Costello, middle and high)


I would look on the ISD website (http://www.systemdynamics.org/) to see the summaries of these sessions. If you need help with the exercises, I'd be happy to walk through them with you.

Also, I developed a systems-based inquiry tool for my doctoral thesis you may find useful as well. The interview-based tool ) requires participants to reason through eight natural/social system "dilemmas." It was designed to give a baseline of how children and their teachers intuitively understand complex systemic phenomena without any formal exposure to system dynamics concepts or tools. It's available in it's entirety through www.umi.com. If you want just a section, let me know I can send you an excerpt.

My best,

Linda Booth Sweeney