CONSTRUCTION OF SYSTEMS THINKING ABILITY ASSESSMENT FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE SUBJECT

Abstract

The purposes of this research are twofold: 1) to create a system thinking ability assessment tool for undergraduate students in the scope of environmental science subject and 2) to evaluate the quality and efficiency of the developed system thinking ability assessment tool. A sample group of 34 general science pre-service teachers from Rajabhat universities in the central, northern, and western regions was selected using the cluster sampling method. The evaluation of the tool’s quality included five personal expert assessment of the index of item-objective congruence (IOC). Difficulty and discrimination indices were calculated using mean and standard deviation statistics. The reliability of the assessment tool was determined using the Kuder-Richardson procedure.

The research results revealed that 1) the assessment tool, comprising two environmental scenarios with 4 multiple-choice questions each, totaling 16 questions related to the eight characteristics of the hierarchical levels of systems thinking and 2) the IOC values ranging from 0.60 to 1.00. The difficulty index ranged from 0.20 to 0.79, and the discrimination index ranged from 0.20 to 0.65. The overall reliability of the assessment tool was 0.60. In the experimental group, the implementation of the system thinking ability assessment tool found that it can classify the level of systems thinking ability. The 57.89 percent of participants demonstrated system thinking abilities in characteristics 1, and 63.16 percent exhibited system thinking abilities in characteristics 2. Those exhibiting abilities beyond these characteristics were less than 50 percent. The experimental group demonstrating characteristics 1 and 2 is categorized as being at a preparatory level in system thinking abilities, with an average percentage of 60.53, whereas the basic to expert levels have an average percentage of less than 50.