Climate change is a critical challenge facing society, and understanding earth systems, like the carbon cycle, has become an essential component of educational curricula around the world. The Swedish compulsory school curriculum emphasises learning about the carbon cycle and its connection with various biological and environmental issues. Understanding the carbon cycle is complex and requires recognising the carbon reservoirs, how carbon atoms circulate between reservoirs, and various dynamic relationships that exist within the system. These characteristics align with systems thinking skills, a crucial aspect of learning and teaching science. Assaraf and Orion (2005) have summarised eight hierarchical characteristics of systems thinking in the context of earth systems and have proposed the Systems Thinking Hierarchical (STH) model to describe how students learn about complex earth systems. The hierarchical levels of this framework include system thinking abilities that comprise analysis (e.g. identifying components), synthesis (e.g. relating components), and implementation (e.g. understanding hidden dimensions).

The carbon cycle is often taught through simplified and static diagrams in school textbooks, which can make learning about this abstract cycle and its interrelating components very challenging for high school students in grades 7-9 (e.g. Düsing, Asshoff, & Hammann, 2019). An example of a common difficulty in this context is to understand how carbon atoms move between various organisational levels. To address such challenges, carefully developed interactive visualizations that guide pupils through the components of the carbon cycle can help scaffold their systems thinking skills. Contemporary research in this area includes work on interactive learning environments in STEM contexts and adaptive feedback for supporting the learning of complex natural systems (Linn et al., 2014; Vitale, McBride, & Linn, 2016). Although these environments have proved promising, there remains a need to explicitly involve teachers in the design process, as well as connect established theoretical frameworks to learning goals of school science curricula. In this regard, not much effort has been directed to pedagogically-informed design and implementation of adaptive interactive learning environments for developing learners’ systems thinking. In fact, very little work has reported systematic design processes as an empirical contribution in the development of science education interventions (e.g. see Bopardikar, Bernstein, & McKenney, 2021).

In response, as part of a larger research program, the purpose of this work is to provide a theoretically and teacher-informed design process of an adaptive interactive visual learning environment that supports the development of grade 7-9 learners’ systems thinking skills in the context of the carbon cycle.

To respond to this aim we describe our iterative and theory-based design process by highlighting the main design activities and the rationale behind them, including: 1) content conceptualisation, 2) pedagogical (teacher) input, and 3) adaptive characteristics. The outcome of this process has resulted in an adaptive interactive visual learning environment with multiple learning tasks and quizzes organised in three modules. Each module is designed with coherent learning objectives aligned with a hierarchy of systems thinking skills and the Swedish school curriculum. Pupils interact with the learning tasks through three core mechanics including: A) dragging and dropping cards to complete a diagram, B) drawing arrows to complete the partial and global cycles, and C) clicking on the icons to reveal more information. Pupils’ interaction with this learning environment is supported through various forms of immediate (e.g. automatically correcting a misdrawn arrow) and delayed feedback (e.g. visual and textual verification of a correct response following a task response). Focusing on the carbon cycle, our work aims to provide a personalised learning experience for learners in grade 7-9 in scaffolding different levels of systems thinking.

We employed an iterative explorative approach to design the target adaptive interactive visual learning environment for supporting systems thinking in the context of the carbon cycle. Emphasis was on defining requirements of the target by exploring alternative possibilities through multiple iterations (Floyd, 1984). Our design activities were structured in three clusters: 1) content conceptualisation, 2) pedagogical (teacher) input, and 3) adaptive characteristics. The content of the learning environment was conceptualised according to the STH model (Assaraf & Orion, 2005) and Sweden's national curriculum through two interdependent processes. Firstly, we developed the domain ontology of the carbon cycle by aligning key learning objectives with the grade 7-9 curriculum and organizing them using the STH model. Defining coherent learning objectives such as identifying main carbon reservoirs and understanding the connection between them, provided the main structure of three learning modules. Secondly, in parallel, we designed interactive learning tasks and quizzes. The quiz questions aimed to enhance learning by building upon the interactive learning tasks by integrating the analysis, synthesis, and implementation systems thinking levels of the STH framework. Pedagogical (teacher) input yielded from a panel of ten science teachers through three focus-group meetings and two sets of individual interviews was integrated with the design process for multiple purposes in several stages (e.g. Bopardikar et al., 2021). For mapping out the design space, the first focus-group meeting involved teachers reflecting on their pedagogical approaches and resources for teaching the carbon cycle. Through additional individual interviews, we asked for their feedback on the defined learning objectives and tasks with a modular structure and consequently integrated their feedback into the design of the environment. To verify our design approach for the three types of interaction mechanics, the main interaction patterns for four learning tasks were presented to teachers through individual interviews. These interviews resulted in adding quiz items to the learning modules to foster pupils’ systems thinking skills between STH levels. In the last step, we presented the panel a summary of the implemented learning tasks to validate our approach. To implement an adaptive learning experience, we applied three adaptive difficulty levels to tasks and quiz questions. The difficulty level of the tasks and quiz questions was adjusted by implementing the mechanism of background logging of each pupil’s progress performance within the environment (Linn et al., 2014). Additionally, we designed and implemented various forms of immediate and delayed feedback to support pupils’ interaction and learning.

Applying an iterative teacher-informed design-based approach resulted in Tracing carbon, an adaptive interactive visual learning environment for developing systems thinking skills in the context of the carbon cycle. Tracing Carbon entails twenty-one learning tasks and six quizzes embedded in three progressive learning modules for grade 7-9 aligned with the STH framework (Assaraf & Orion, 2005) and the Swedish school curriculum. Pupils commence the learning experience by exploring how carbon circulates within a forest ecosystem in the first module. In the second module, students engage with global aspects of the carbon cycle, and in the third module they investigate the influence of human activities on the natural carbon cycle. As pupils progress through the learning modules, they actively interact with the visualisations and complete the visual based tasks while developing their systems thinking. This interaction is afforded through three core mechanics including: A) dragging and dropping cards to complete a diagram (e.g. components of the reservoirs), B) drawing arrows to complete the partial and global cycles, and C) clicking on the icons to reveal more information (e.g. about photosynthesis). Each learning module entails two quizzes that aim to support developing systems thinking skills in addition to reasoning and critical thinking. Tracing carbon provides a personalised learning experience by adjusting the difficulty of the tasks and questions according to each pupil’s real-time performance. As pupils engage with Tracing Carbon, the environment tracks their progress, evaluates their performance, and adjusts the presented difficulty of the tasks and quiz questions. Various forms of immediate and delayed feedback validate pupils’ correct answers and supports them in addressing their errors during the tasks and quizzes. Future work will explore pupils’ and teachers’ interaction with the environment and the impact of its adaptive characteristics on pupil’s learning of the carbon cycle.

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