This is the new updated edition of the first book in the bestselling Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series. Like the first edition of volume 1, this book helps pinpoint what your students know (or think they know) so you can monitor their learning and adjust your teaching accordingly. Loaded with classroom-friendly features you can use immediately, the book includes 25 “probes”—brief, easily administered formative assessments designed to understand your students’ thinking about 60 core science concepts.

Access this probe as a Google form: English

Download this probe as an editable PDF: English

The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about systems. The probe is designed to find out whether students can recognize that things with parts that interact or influence each other are systems.

Justified List

system

The best answer is that everything except for the pile of sand and box of nails can be considered to be a system. If you remove some of the sand, it is still a pile of sand. Removing a sand grain, a cup of sand, or a bucket of sand does not influence whether the sand is still a sandpile, nor do the parts of the sand interact with one another. The nails in the box do not interact with or influence each other. They may be part of a larger system but by themselves they are not a system. You can remove some of the nails and you still have a box of nails. However, there are ways one could stretch this to justify that the sandpile or box of nails is a system. For example, the atoms that make up the sand or nails interact with one another.

Systems range from the simple to the complex. A system is a collection of things (including processes) that have some influence on one another and the whole (AAAS 1989). Systems can be manufactured objects (thermometer, bicycle, cell phone, electrical circuit), life-forms (grasshopper, human body, seed, cell), combinations of living and nonliving things (food web, aquarium, ocean, soil, Earth), physical bodies (volcano, Earth and its Moon), processes (water cycle, hurricane, digestion), or quantiative relationships (Density = Mass/Volume, A + B = C, graph). To be considered a system, the components must interact with or influence each other in some way. Systems are often connected to other systems, may have subsystems, and may be part of larger systems (e.g., human body systems). Their inputs and outputs can include matter, energy, or information.

Elementary Students

In the elementary grades, systems begin with parts-and-wholes relationships. Students begin to identify parts of objects such as toy vehicles, animals, dolls, and houses and observe how one part connects to and affects another. This sets the stage for taking apart and reassembling more complicated mechanical systems, emphasizing the importance of the arrangement of parts, and recognizing interactions.

Middle School Students

In the middle grades, students begin thinking from a systems approach, analyzing parts and interactions and identifying subsystems. Disassembly of more complex objects such as clocks or bicycles provides opportunities to describe the interaction of parts, not simply label collections as systems. Projects in which students design, assemble, analyze, and troubleshoot manufactured systems (e.g., battery-powered electrical circuit) and examine biological systems (e.g., organisms in an aquarium) are common at this grade span. Experiences are provided in which inputs to a system that affect the output are changed (e.g., adding another battery to a circuit, adding more fish to an aquarium). Emphasis is placed on the connections among systems; a battery can be thought of as a system that is also part of a larger system in a circuit, and a fish itself can be considered to be a system that is part of a larger system in an aquarium.

High School Students

Students at the high school level have opportunities to reflect on the value of thinking in terms of systems and to apply the concept in a variety of contexts. Through projects, readings, experiments, and discussion, students analyze the boundaries and components of systems and distinguish the properties of the system from the properties of the parts. Students begin to use the concept of feedback mechanisms (e.g., homeostasis) to explain why things happen and predict changes that may occur.

This probe is best used at the upper-elementary, middle, and high school levels. It can be used as a paper and pencil assessment to gather students’ ideas for later analysis as well as a stimulus for provoking discussion about systems. It can also be administered as a card sort with small groups sorting examples into two groups—“Is a System” or “Is Not a System”—justifying their reasons as they place each card into a category. Remove items that students may be unfamiliar with and/or add items that connect to systems ideas in your curriculum.

• Elementary students may believe that a system of objects must be doing something in order to be a system or that a system that loses a part of itself is still the same system (AAAS 1993).
• Students of all ages tend to interpret phenomena by noting the qualities of separate objects rather than by seeing the interactions between the parts of a system (e.g., force is considered as a property of bodies rather than as an interaction between bodies; AAAS 1993).
• Students explain changes as a directional chain of cause and effect rather than as two systems interacting (AAAS 1993).

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 2001. Atlas of science literacy. Vol. 1. (See “Systems,” pp. 132–133.) Washington, DC: AAAS.

Breene, A., and D. Gilewski. 2008. Investigating ecosystems in a biobottle. Science Scope (Feb.): 12–15.

Hmelo-Silver, C. E., R. Jordan, L. Liu, S. Gray, M. Demeter, S. Rugaber, S. Vattam, and A. Goel. 2008. Focusing on function: Thinking below the surface of complex natural systems. Science Scope (July): 27–35.

Leager, C. R. 2007. Ecosystem in a jar. Science & Children (Apr./May): 56–58.

Llewellyn, D., and S. Johnson. 2008. Teaching science through a systems approach. Science Scope (July): 21–26.

Ludwig, C., and N. S. Baliga. 2008. Systems concepts effectively taught: Using systems practices. Science Scope (July): 16–20.

National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). 2006. Coral ecosystems. NSTA SciGuide. Online at http://learningcenter.nsta.org/search.aspx?action= quicksearch&text=Coral%20Reef%20Ecosystems

• Provide students with opportunities to examine a variety of examples of familiar manufactured systems (bicycle, can opener, pencil sharpener, flashlight). Ask questions about what this example of a system does; what the boundaries, inputs, and outputs are; and how the components interact and contribute to the system as a whole. Then ask the same questions about a natural system (e.g., a familiar ecosystem, a cell, the solar system). Emphasize the interactions and influences, not simply the names of the components. A list of questions about systems accompanies the American Association for the Advancement of Science Project 2061 lesson “Seeing the Cell as a System,” included in Resources for Science Literacy (AAAS 1997). This lesson can also be accessed online at www.project2061.org/ publications/rsl/online/guide/ch2/hlpsys0.pdf and www.project2061.org/publications/rsl/ online/guide/ch2/hqsystem.pdf.
• Challenge students to come up with examples of systems that have the word system in them (e.g., solar system, school system, human body systems, ecosystem). Ask them what all of these things have in common that make them systems. Then challenge them to come up with examples of systems that do not include the word system.
• Use a FACT (formative assessment classroom technique) such as the Frayer Model, Scientist’s Idea strategy, or First Word– Last Word to determine students’ ideas about systems before and after instruction (Keeley 2008).
• Integrate the unifying theme of systems into content domains in a variety of contexts. Make explicit connections between systems-thinking and life science (the human body, cells, photosynthesis), Earth/environmental science (ecosystems, climate and weather, Earth system interactions), and physical science (force and motion, energy transfer and transformation) ideas.
• Develop the ideas of input, output, and interactions among components during engineering design exploration and analysis.
• Connect ideas about systems to the idea of models, data collection, and graphing. The purpose of studying systems is to develop the ability to think and analyze in terms of systems. Such thinking can strengthen the skill of identifying regularities and patterns, which supports an understanding of models that explain the world. Prediction from a systems perspective involves using knowledge about the world and an understanding of trends in data to identify and explain observations or changes in advance.
• Challenge students to come up with ideas of things that are not systems. Ask them to apply their lists of characteristics of a system to decide whether the item is a system or not.