Systems and Systems Thinking in Biology Education
What is a system?
A "system" is commonly defined as an entity made of interrelated or interacting components that function together as a whole.
All living things are systems, each made of many interacting parts that function together as a whole. Living systems are complex: they have hierarchical organization, emergent properties, and regulatory feedback loops that maintain stability and coordinate functions and responses to signals. At every level of organization, living systems (cells, organisms, ecosystems): move and transform energy, matter, and information; sense and respond to internal and external stimuli; interact with one another and with their environments. Biology is the science that studies living systems.
'Systems' is a Core Idea in Science Education
The Vision & Change in Undergraduate Biology Education report (Brewer and Smith, 2011) identified five broad core concepts of biology: Evolution; Structure and Function; Information Flow, Exchange and Storage; Pathways and Transformations of Matter and Energy; and, Systems.
At the K-12 level, the Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) includes "systems and system models" as a crosscutting concept for all of STEM (that is, a concept that bridges disciplinary boundaries and serves as a framework for connecting diverse disciplines).
We propose that Systems is more than a core concept in biology.
Used as an organizing principle, systems allows articulating the relationships among the Vision and Change core concepts (Figure 1; Momsen et al., 2022): biology is the study of living systems, which have structures that interact to perform diverse functions, including flow, exchange, and storage of information, and movement and transformation of matter and energy. As living systems interact with one another and with the physical environment, they sense and respond to cues and stimuli, maintain a constant internal environment (homeostasis), and changing over time (evolution).
Figure 1, from Momsen et al., 2022. (a) the five core concepts for undergraduate biology education listed in Vision and Change; (b) our model of how systems serves as an
How do biologists reason about living systems?
Biologists (in the laboratory, field, or classroom) study and reason about the structure and function of living systems, as well as the mechanisms, processes, and emergent phenomena that characterize life. In other words, biology studies what the structures and parts of living systems are, how these parts interact to achieve functions, and why biological phenomena occur.
Systems Thinking in the biology classroom
Systems thinking (ST) enables us to organize our knowledge of biological systems and to reason about how they work. Biologists who routinely apply systems thinking in their work likely acquire this way of reasoning with time and practice.
Can classrooms can be designed to cultivate systems thinking (ST) skills?
We identified Biology Systems Thinking (BST) skills that are relevant to biology research, teaching and learning and we are working on incorporating a systems perspective and systems thinking in the biology classroom.
We adopt principles from the Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) Theory of Systems to provide a unifying language for describing and reasoning about systems.
