Multiple Representations in Modeling Strategies for the Development of Systems Thinking in Biology Education
For biological researchers, systems thinking is a basic conceptual framework, and many educationalists consider systems thinking as a metacognitive skill that enables students to understand and cope with the new scientific advancements that reach our soci
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Multiple Representations in Modeling Strategies for the Development of Systems Thinking in Biology Education Roald Pieter Verhoeff, Kerst Th Boersma, and Arend Jan Waarlo
Introduction Biologists try to bring order in the endless variety of life’s structures and processes. In doing so, they trace the process of evolution from relatively simple life forms preceding eukaryotic cells to the complex multicellular organisms living together in similar complex ecosystems. Today, biological research is often considered to have entered the era of post-genomics research in which the complexity of life is explained via an integrated approach from many disciplines including bioinformatics, evolutionary biology, and genomics. This transdisciplinary approach to the study of the complex physical and chemical organization of life is typical to a systems thinking approach as von Bertalanffy (1945, 1950) already articulated in the 1930s1 with his General Systems Theory. For biological researchers, systems thinking is a basic conceptual framework underlying their daily work on complex and dynamic living systems. In molecular biology, for example, systems biology refers to the integration of experimental and computational approaches to understand and predict complex cellular functions (Alberghina, 2007), and evolutionary biology—traditionally engaged in searching for similarities in anatomy,
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Bertalanffy developed his General Systems Theory first via lectures, beginning in the 1930s and later via publications, starting in 1945. R.P. Verhoeff (*) Department of Philosophy and Science Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] K. Th Boersma Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] A.J. Waarlo Centre for Science and Mathematics Education, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] D.F. Treagust and C.-Y. Tsui (eds.), Multiple Representations in Biological Education, Models and Modeling in Science Education 7, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4192-8_18, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013
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embryology, and physiology—has been integrated with comparing proteins and genome sequences between organisms (Moore, 2007). Following the transformation of studies of virtually all life processes, many educationalists consider systems thinking as a metacognitive skill that enables students to understand and cope with these new scientific advancements that reach our society. Systems thinking is one of the skills required by the Dutch examination syllabus for biology; students should be able to demonstrate an understanding that biological relations are complex by nature and often cannot be explained in a monocausal way. Students should also be able to relate biological phenomena at various levels of organization to one another. Knippels (2002) proposed a strategy based on systems thinking for genetics education: the “yo-yo strategy.” This yo-yo strategy copes with complexity by explicitly dist
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