Systems thinking has been an educational priority for more than a decade, yet its related assessment and teaching strategies have been understudied in the chemistry education research community. Through the lens of systems thinking, this study explores how undergraduate students connect and translate their conceptual representations when they are involved in contextualised problem-solving. The ‘Contextualised Problem Solving’ (CPS) assessment instrument contains four open-ended questions about gas law. Three different cohorts of students registered in a physical science course (2016 Fall, 2017 Spring, 2017 Fall semesters) participated in the problem-solving component of CPS. The results showed that only 8% of students were capable of higher order systems thinking ability when they engaged in problem solving. Over half of the students failed to retrieve essential concepts in problem situations. Most of the participants demonstrated difficulties in organising related systems’ components, understanding the cyclic nature of relationships among systems, and identifying limitations in a specific problem context. By identifying the difficulties and challenges of systems thinking experienced by undergraduate students in solving complex chemistry problems, these findings have the potential to provide fresh insights into effective teaching strategies to promote students’ higher order thinking skills.

中文翻译：

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确定大学生在气体定律化学问题解决中遇到的系统思维的挑战性特征

在过去的十多年中，系统思维一直是教育的重中之重，但是化学教育研究界却对它的相关评估和教学策略进行了研究。通过系统思考的视角，本研究探索了本科生在参与情境化问题解决中时如何联系和翻译他们的概念表示。“情境解决问题”（CPS）评估工具包含有关燃气法的四个开放性问题。在物理课程中注册的三组不同的学生（2016年秋季，2017年春季，2017年秋季学期）参加了CPS的问题解决部分。结果显示，只有8％的学生在解决问题时具有较高系统的思维能力。超过一半的学生未能在遇到问题的情况下检索基本概念。大多数参与者表现出在组织相关系统组件，理解系统之间关系的周期性以及在特定问题背景下确定局限性方面的困难。通过发现大学生在解决复杂化学问题上遇到的系统思考的困难和挑战，这些发现有可能为有效的教学策略提供新的见解，以提高学生的高阶思维能力。