The world loses 52, 000 square kilometer of forest every year, will face global temperature rise to 2^oC by excessive amount of GHG emission before in the 21^st century and sees the addition of nearly 80 million human beings on the planet every year (Worldwatch Institute, 2014) and will lose 50 % of its species in the following 50 years (Thomas et al., 2004). These facts clearly emphasize that our future health and prosperity depend heavily on climate change, biological diversity, and the health of earth system. On the verge of vivid technological and economic developments together with unstoppable world population growth, the earth is facing environmental, economic, and social problems at both local and global level. It is obvious that the problems the world face today are the result of human actions. Another obvious point is that human beings are the most intelligent and educated creatures on the earth yet cannot stop these problems. It is worth noting that contemporary education has reached to its peak point yet has not helped as a barrier to the human brutality. Human desires, economic development targets, and politics invaded contemporary education system in such a way that functions as a tool to fulfill human desires and wants. Another problem of our education is that it dismantled the world into pieces and called them as disciplines and sub-disciplines (Orr, 1994). As a result of this defragmentation, most students graduate with no sense of integrity and unity (Orr, 1994). So, the point is that education is not the solution for our problems yet specific type of education could recover our planet and humanity. In this manner, rethinking education has become an unavoidable option for us to initiate educational reform that could provide solutions for our earth systems and future health.

One approach to educating people on this issue is the concept of education for sustainable development (ESD). ESD was first pointed out by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992). This conceptualization of the sustainability paradigm includes environmental (e.g., land and water use, and biodiversity), social (e.g., population health and human welfare, ethics), and economic (e.g., business, jobs) aspects (UNESCO, 2006). With respect to the nature of education within the ESD paradigm, its core is teaching the ability to make connections between system components and the larger systems. This is because of the fact that sustainability issues are linked and part of a “whole.”  In this manner, system thinking has been proposed as an approach to help understand sustainability paradigm (UNESCO, 2012).

At a basic level a system is defined as “a collection of parts and/or processes” (Penner, 2000). To be more specific, system thinking can be described as thinking as a whole through identifying and analyzing the relationship between the parts of a system (Assaraf & Orion, 2005). The system thinking studies that are focused on the cyclic processes such as hydro cycle (Assaraf & Orion, 2005), human body system (Verhoeff, 2003), and engineering suggest that system thinking models are context specific. Yet, the fundamental characteristic in system thinking is thinking as a whole. Taking this into consideration it can be argued that the sustainability paradigm could be conceptualized via thinking as a whole while understanding the relationship between the dimensions that are environmental, social, and economic.   

Hence the purpose of the study is to explore approaches to analyze undergraduates’ system thinking abilities. The research question formulated as follow:

What is the level of systems thinking skills of undergraduate students in the context of exploring the components of global problems of sustainability?

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