Abstract for: Systems Thinking in K-12 Education in Türkiye

Education systems worldwide produce students who struggle to reason about complex, interconnected systems — defaulting to linear causality, surface-level heuristics, and single-variable thinking. This systems literacy deficit affects performance across science, mathematics, and social domains. Despite decades of evidence that explicit ST/SD instruction produces measurable improvements in these capacities, scalable and sustainable national integration of systems thinking into K-12 education remains largely unachieved in most countries. The Systems Thinking Association in Türkiye, established in 2016 and built on nine prior years of experience, pursued simultaneous intervention at three levels: classroom implementation to develop and validate prototypes; education faculty engagement to build institutional capacity for pre-service training; and national curriculum policy integration for system-wide scale. The strategy, guided by a Bass diffusion model, operates entirely through voluntary participation and a lean organisational structure without external funding. Over eleven years, the association trained 848 teachers, developed 310 freely accessible curriculum resources, and sustained an average of more than one mentoring meeting per day. ST/SD courses are now offered at four universities. Research evidence documents statistically significant improvements in student outcomes across preschool through high school. Most significantly, system literacy was adopted as a core competency in Türkiye's 2024 national curriculum framework. The Turkish case establishes that sustainable national ST/SD integration requires simultaneous intervention at classroom, academic, and policy levels — each necessary but insufficient alone. The volunteer-driven organisational model is as replicable as the pedagogical one. Mandatory implementation introduces dilution risks and quality assurance challenges at scale, which a proposed national Systems Thinking Institute embedded in higher education is designed to address. The strategic logic transfers to other national contexts.