A Scoping Review of Systems Thinking in Undergraduate STEM Education

Abstract

Systems thinking has gained increasing visibility among contemporary STEM education as a means to prepare undergraduates to solve multifaceted challenges and understand connections across disciplines. However, the current educational field lacks a unified operational framework to implement systems thinking models into actionable teaching practices. As a result, most disciplines rely on bespoke systems thinking inventories with various foci to facilitate students’ systems thinking skills. This scoping review searched seven sources (ERIC, ASSIA, Education Research Complete, Web of Science, Business Source Complete, Google Scholar, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses) through July 2024 in accordance with PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-ScR guidance. The raw literature corpus was extracted, categorized, and analyzed using exact-frequency counts, ambiguity filtering, and n-gram extraction. The study results indicate the majority of the existing literature positions systems thinking as a multidisciplinary construct (e.g., system dynamics, complex systems), competencies, interconnections, and modeling tools (e.g., concept maps, causal loop diagrams) across various frameworks. The overall text-mining result indicates that systems thinking has gained significant attention across various STEM disciplines in the contemporary literature. However, future research must prioritize the development of shared assessment tools across the disciplines to bridge the gap between broad competency language and domain-specific modeling.