ICAT Playdate: Metacognitive Systems Thinking: Scaffolding Learning and Assessment of a Complex Interdisciplinary Workplace Competency

Term: Fall 2025

Date: December 5th, 2025

Time: 8:30 to 9:30 a.m.

Location: Community Assembly in the Creativity + Innovation District Living-Learning Community

Instructor: Phyllis Newbill

Presented By: Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT)

Description:

We operate in a world of increasing scientific, social, cultural, political, and ethical complexity, and systems thinking is often lauded as an answer to help navigate such complexities in both large scale wicked problems or grand challenges as well as everyday professional situations. Members of our team have been leading research to better theorize and operationalize the processes of metacognitive systems thinking and to advance work that scaffolds the teaching and assessment of such complex competencies. One strand of our work advanced an interdisciplinary and metacognitive focused approach to teaching and assessing systems thinking through an open-ended scenario (Abeesee Scenario) anchored in literature constructs which has been used in a variety of settings for research and teaching. This work has grown into other opportunities to assess systems thinking in formal and informal settings such as in the Stemmler Award collaboration Operationalizing, Validating, and Scaling Health Systems Citizenship Assessment in Undergraduate Medical Education which led to the development of an Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) to assess systems thinking in clinical encounters. Additionally, as a key cross-cutting approach in the new Smart Healthcare Hub (Destination Area 2.0 Phase 2) we are piloting the Systems Thinking Playground — a new platform which serves case scenarios in an environment where LLMs can help incorporate new survey/scenario features such as interactive follow up questions and Stakeholder Chat features as part of the assessment.

Speakers:

Jake Grohs