What does a student with systems thinking competences look like in geography study? By what methods can it be assessed? The purpose of this research is to redefine what systems thinking competencies are in geography education and to develop assessment methods for them.
 This research developed a rubric for assessing and visualising geographical systems thinking competencies, based on the way of thinking in German about spatial concepts. The rubric was designed to be shared with students and to be used throughout several units of lessons, independent of the content of each unit of lessons. The rubric has three levels of assessment criteria for each of the eight sub-competencies. The development of students’ competencies was analysed by having them complete several performance tasks that involved systems thinking using relational structure diagrams, assessing their outputs using the developed rubric, and providing repeated feedback. In addition, multiple questionnaires were administered to analyse students’ cognitions of systems thinking, and the results of the responses were analysed.
 The study achieved the following three results.
 First, the developed rubric made it possible to visualise students’ geographical system competencies, and it was clear that the majority of students developed their competencies significantly throughout the year. This is because the students themselves were able to objectively meta-recognise the current levels of geographical system competencies through rubric feedback.
 Second, it was clear that the students themselves systematically understood the opinions of others, exchanged opinions critically and logically, pointed out what could be improved, and collaboratively developed better opinions. Students tend to speak out subjectively on certain social issues, but this shows that systems thinking has the potential to overcome this barrier.
 Finally, it became clear what kind of ‘difficulties’ the students felt and faced when engaging in systems thinking. It was found that the students felt difficulties in using the relational structure diagram as a thinking tool itself and in conceiving alternative scenarios, as well as the existence of difficulties that were not metacognised by the students.
 These findings will lead to a search for more effective lesson planning and teacher-measures for the development of geographical system competencies.

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