Table 1
Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) general concepts1 used during the sessions followed by the experimental group (all the proposed concepts are retrieved or derived from SUMA educational framework [Hristovski et al., 2020]. The derived concepts are marked by an asterisk).
| DST Concepts | Definition |
| Self-organization | Spontaneous process where some form of overall order arises from local or global interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. |
| Synergies* | Spontaneous formation of structural and functional couplings among components, which reciprocally compensate each other with respect to the context, to achieve task goals. |
| Emergence | Radical novelty in the higher-level behavior of systems resulting from interactions in the lower-level components within those systems. |
| Nestedness* | Larger to smaller emergent levels of organization. Smaller modules, each of them providing a certain function, are used within larger modules that perform more complex functions. |
| Dynamic system | System changing over time. |
| Stability | Resilience to perturbations. The necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of any system’s behavior/structure. |
| Instability | The behavior/structure of a system which tends to vanish and switch to a stable state. |
| Phase transition | The spontaneous qualitative change of the system as a result of the instability of the previous state. |
| Attractor | Behavioral or structural states toward which, under some specific context, the system converges over time. |
| Repeller | Unstable state of system’s behavior. |
| Constraint/context | Boundary conditions, limitations that apply restrictions to the degrees of freedom of a system. |
| 1 Synergies and nestedness are not truly DST concepts but are derivable from them and have a wide explanatory scope within the bio-psycho-social sciences. | |
