Developing and assessing systems thinking competencies in geography education: through rubric-based feedback

Systems thinking competency, which UNESCO has identified as one of the key competencies for achieving the SDGs, is defined as the abilities to recognize and understand relationships; to analyse complex systems; to think of how systems are embedded within different domains and different scales; and to deal with uncertainty.(UNESCO,2017) In geography education, space is regarded as a system, and geographic system competency has been defined and its development has been advanced in German-speaking countries and other countries.

On the other hand, the assessment of geographic system competency in Europe, especially in Germany, is mainly based on paper tests, which are diagnostic assessments at a certain point in time, so there is much uncertainty about what daily practices in the classroom will contribute to the development of geographic system competency. Although the importance of the development of geographic system competency is gradually being recognized in Japan, there are still no reports of objective and quantitative analyses of the growth of competencies, and research on the process of competency development is still insufficiently accumulated.

In this research, I organized eight perspectives that correspond to students' thinking processes that support geographic system competencies, and developed a rubric that created evaluation criteria for each perspective. The reason for using a rubric as the assessment method is that it facilitates the visualization of the qualitative level of achievement of the competencies that students are currently acquiring, and enables the sharing of perspectives and processes with students as general competencies that are not dependent on the learning content of the material taught in class. In designing the rubric, I referred to the accumulation of previous studies on geographic system competencies in German-speaking countries and the Standards for secondary geography education presented by the German Geographical Society (DGfG). The rubric includes the following perspectives: mapping relationships among elements, being aware of time scales and perspectives of various people, and proposing alternatives to solve current problems after identifying one's own priority value criteria. This corresponds to the order of thinking that students need to use systems thinking.

Based on this, I conducted a class on banana plantation and used this rubric to visualize the students' achievement and provide feedback. By analyzing the results of the rubric assessment and student questionnaires, the following four points regarding the development of geographic system competencies became clear.

・To enable the process and assessment of individual students' systems thinking, which has been difficult to see previously.

・To enable students to metacognize the level of achievement of their geographic system competencies (and their perspectives) and to encourage reflection on what needs to be improved.

・To help students recognize the importance of systems thinking themselves, and to provide an opportunity for them to change, which will lead to the development of competency.

・To enable students to become aware of the difficulty of finding solutions to problems based on their complexity, and to develop an attitude of citizenship that encourages them to take a proactive role in realizing a sustainable society.