Author(s):
Need: Feedback loops offer explanatory and predictive power around many phenomena that matter to students, employers, society, and the planet. Feedback loops help explain addiction, epidemics, climate change, hostilities between nations, invasive species, avalanches, and social media. Feedback loops enable growth and decay, explosions and collapses, stability and regulatory control. Feedback loops show up in numerous academic courses, but very few teach about loops as a generalizable concept that transcends fields. Evidence from both practitioners and researchers shows that teaching and learning about systems in general and feedback loops in specific is challenging.Guiding Question: The project aims to foster five broad learning goals: 1) Learners are aware that feedback loops are a common phenomenon across many natural and human built systems, 2) Learners understand how positive feedback loops generate growth or decay and how negative feedback loops generate stable behavior, 3) Learners can recognize feedback loops when they encounter them in different contexts, 4) Learners can create causal loop diagrams of unfamiliar systems to generate explanations or predictions, 5) Learners can propose modifications to a system that will strengthen loops with desirable outcomes and disrupt loops with undesirable outcomes.The poster focuses on goal 4: Causal loop diagrams (CLD) are a visual representation of systems, in which text nodes are used to depict system elements capable of change over time, and arrows are used to depict pathways by which change in one node can cause or influence change in another node. CLDs are valuable in education as they foreground pathways of influence and the recursive nature of feedback loops. Our research question is: Can generalizable feedback loop thinking be made accessible to undergraduates in the context of science or social science courses, without requiring specialized systems dynamics coursework?Outcomes: The project’s ultimate deliverables will include activities for four pilot course topics (Race and Gender in STEM, Psychology of Food, Functional Neuroanatomy, and Urban Oceanography) where CLDs are constructed from short narratives in which feedback loops are explicated, plus a library of links to popular media articles in which feedback loops are embedded, and guidance on how to coach students on using CLDs to identify spots for intervention. We developed and field-tested a rubric for assessing the quality of feedback loop understanding evinced by a diagram. Work will be disseminated at a 3-day workshop for Earth science educators this summer. Material for the workshop will be available at the poster for review and discussion.Broader Impacts: Designing our instructional materials as templates that can be adapted to social and natural science disciplines supports our learning goals across a range of disciplines. Achieving these learning goals, initially in our pilot classes and in the classes of instructors reached by our dissemination program, has the potential to improve the well-being of individuals throughout society. Individuals equipped to recognize and reason about feedback loops will be better able to diagnose some puzzling, stubborn problems that are dragging them in undesirable directions, and better able to shape or navigate complex systems towards desirable outcomes.
Coauthors
Logan Brenner, Barnard College, NY, NY; Alexandra Davatzes, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; Kim Kastens, Columbia University, NY, NY
