Subject: Systems thinking for preschoolers

Posted by Niall Palfreyman on 12/9/2008
In Reply To:Systems thinking for preschoolers Posted by Laura Skelton on 12/9/2008

Message:

Laura Skelton schrieb:
> Yes, I think preschoolers could adopt systems thinking methods.
I agree within limits. I'm thinking in particular of stories like Dr.
Seuss's 'Lorax', which children love in my experience.

However it seems to me that there is a problem with preschoolers. The idea of a stock is based on the idea of a conserved quantity. Piaget did a load of stuff on conservation suggesting that preschoolers have severe difficulties with it, however not all of his findings are supported by more recent work. For example Bryant & Trabasso (1971) found, contrary to Piaget, that preschoolers are capable of transitive inference, which is related to conservation.

My feeling is that systems dynamics contains at least two components:
causal connectedness and accumulation of change. Only the first of these does not require conservation. I therefore think preschoolers could well cope with the ideas of causal connectedness represented, for example, in a causal-loop diagram, but they would probably have difficulty with the additional aspect of accumulation which is contained in stock-and-flow situations. I think this is one of the lovely things about the Lorax: it uses the fact that children can understand connectedness to help them start to understand accumulation.

Niall Palfreyman.

Follow Ups:

Systems thinking for preschoolers - Kahina Lasfer 12/9/2008 
Systems thinking for preschoolers - Niall Palfreyman 12/11/2008
Systems thinking for preschoolers - Bill Rathborne 12/11/2008