North American red-eared sliders at Baldeneysee in Essen, raccoons at Alexanderplatz in Berlin and swarms of African ring-necked parakeets in Cologne - invasive species are increasingly shaping our local nature and influencing our ecosystems. It is questionable what influence biological invasions have on biodiversity and to what extent the preservation of native species must be ensured by suppressing neobiota. These questions dominate the current sustainability discourse. In the sense of sustainable development (BNE) it is task of the school to take up this controversial topic with students in class. As a new generation, they will decide on environmental policy issues in the future, and therefore should gain competences through their school education that enable them to act sustainably. One of the central cognitive skills for realizing sustainable development is systemic thinking. Systemic thinking encompasses the competence within a system to identify system elements and their interactions, to recognize system boundaries and to record cyclical and temporal dynamics (Ben-Zvi Assaraf and Orion 2005; Mehren et al. 2018).

This project investigates the extent to which students possess systems thinking skills in dealing with changing systems. The focus will be on the competence to deal with the temporal change of a system that crosses a system boundary. In a biological context, neobiota represent such a change. Based on the System Thinking Hierarchy (STH) model of Ben-Zvi Assaraf and Orion (2005) performance tests are developed and performed. Based on the evaluation, it will be possible to comprehensively represent the system thinking of students in dealing with changing systems and to relate it to influencing variables, such as the trophic level or the anthropological value of the added element.

Lankers, A., Timm, J., & Schmiemann, P. (2023). Students’ systems thinking while modeling a dynamic ecological system. Frontiers in Education, 8, Article 1187237. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1187237

Ben-Zvi Assaraf, O. & Orion, N. (2005). Development of system thinking skills in the context of earth system education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. 42(5), S. 518–560. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20061

Mehren, R., Rempfler, A., Buchholz, J., Hartig, J., & Ulrich-Riedhammer, E. (2018): System competence modelling. Theoretical foundation and empirical validation of a model involving natural, social, and human-environment systems. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 55(5), S. 685–711. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21436