Improving system dynamics teaching using online surveys and exercises

As the world becomes increasingly connected, traditional problem solving and decision-making skills becomes less effective. Complex systems found in nature and society exhibit long time delays between cause and effect, feedback, and non-linearity making it difficult to reason effectively about system behavior. Recent studies have shown even highly educated graduate students lack basic systems thinking skills indicating a need for improved system dynamics education. This paper describes the development of a two new tools for improving system dynamics education: a stock-flow simulator that allows users to experiment with simple stock-flow systems, and a web application framework for building system dynamics surveys. This framework is used to build a survey capable of evaluating systems thinking skills and compare the effectiveness of online teaching methods.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Behrens, Nicholas A

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John Sterman.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36796

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36796