Overview

Human development and education can benefit from a framework that analyzes behavior and brain change as involving dynamic systems processes. Dynamic systems researchers build specific models focusing on processes of change in learning and teaching, beginning with individual growth patterns and including in mathematical models multiple layers and scales of casual interaction. These models shift the focus of research and assessment to individual behavior, fluctuations in time, and the combination of gradual change with periodic abrupt changes in performance and brain patterns. Dynamic systems models explain and predict important properties of learning and teaching such as non-linear change and self-organization (spontaneous increase of order and information). They readily combine apparently opposite processes in the same theory and model, such as gene versus environment or individual versus context/culture, a characteristic called superposition. Measurements should involve the kind of assessment that teachers and schools do every day in the classroom – repeated measures of individual behavior. The models then provide ways of analyzing common educational phenomena, such as variability in performance, ambiguity of behavior, and context specificity. A dynamic approach promises to provide useful tools for understanding the complex individual changes that occur during education and child development.

The Editors

Human development constitutes a complex system. Rocha (1999) defines a complex system as “… any system featuring a large number of interacting components (agents, processes, etc.) … whose aggregate activity is nonlinear (not derivable from the summations of the activity of individual components) … and typically exhibits … self-organization …”.