New Perspectives in Science Education

Systems thinking is the development of an understanding of how the individual elements of a system interact with each other, thereby influencing each other, and determining the behaviour of the system as whole. Causal mapping is used in systems thinking to visualise and educate people on how the different components of the system interact with each other. In this research, we present an online causal mapping tool which can be used for ocean/environmental systems education. The paper contains a review of the existing approaches to the use of system thinking in education and how those approaches compare with our approach. The results of the comparison shows that our tool compares favourably with existing approaches which use system thinking as a basis for education. The tool also has the advantages of being based on an ontology and can be used to link the causal map elements with the contents of an online knowledge base. We also provide an analysis, from an education perspective, regarding the use of the online causal mapping tool to create causal maps of ocean related topics. This analysis reveals how the tool was used to create the causal maps and provides insights into how the causal maps can be improved to make them more educationally beneficial.

Keywords: Systems thinking, Education, Causal Mapping, Environment, Ocean.