Developing Students’ Systems Thinking Capabilities with Case-Based Learning and Concept Mapping: A Quasi-Experimental Study on Ecosystems and Feeding Relationships

Developing students’ systems thinking is important but challenging in middle-school ecology. This quasi-experimental study examined whether an instructional package combining case-based learning and concept mapping, as implemented under routine classroom conditions, was associated with different patterns of growth across levels of the Systems Thinking Hierarchy. A total of 177 eighth-grade students from six intact classes completed parallel pre- and post-assessments during an ecosystems unit. Student-level repeated-measures analyses showed no clear differential pattern at the level of identifying components and processes. Larger observed gains appeared in understanding relationships, organization, and matter-energy cycles, and a smaller pattern in the same direction appeared in generalization, temporal reasoning, and hidden dimensions. However, because students were nested within only six classes, each condition was taught by a different teacher, and the experimental teacher received targeted preparation, the findings should be interpreted cautiously as associations linked to an instructional package rather than as teacher-independent causal effects. The results suggest that classroom enactments combining cases and concept mapping may help students move beyond isolated ecological facts toward more relational explanations, while higher-order systems thinking remains difficult and likely requires longer-term scaffolding in routine middle-school biology lessons over a short instructional unit.