What it shows
Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory places the developing person at the center of nested systems, and this drawing shows them as concentric circles. The microsystem, exosystem and macrosystem are rings. The mesosystem is drawn instead as a two-headed arrow from home to school, since it consists of links between microsystem settings, not a further setting. The chronosystem is a time arrow under the circles: it is change over time, not a place.
The definitions are adapted from the sources listed below, and each of Maya’s examples is the kind they give for that system. Maya, a fictional 10-year-old, runs through all five, and a panel beside the circles gives each system’s one-line description and her part of it.
How to read it
Maya’s microsystem holds the settings she takes part in directly: her home, her class at school and her soccer team.
The mesosystem arrow joins two of them. Her parents meet her teacher about her reading.
Her mother’s workplace is in the exosystem. Maya is never there, but her mother’s new job brings evening shifts, so Maya sees her less in the evenings.
The macrosystem is the wider culture, with its values, beliefs and laws. Her country funds little after-school childcare, so her evenings fall to her family.
Along the chronosystem arrow, her parents divorce when she is 11, and she changes school at 12.
The five systems
- Microsystem: settings the person takes part in directly.
- Mesosystem: links between those settings.
- Exosystem: settings the person is not in that still affect them.
- Macrosystem: the wider culture, its values, beliefs and laws.
- Chronosystem: change over time, in the person and in their world.
Ways to use it in teaching
Students redraw the circles for a learner they teach, or for themselves at school age, with one example per system. Which system can a teacher do least about?
Ask where a school’s homework policy sits for Maya, and then for her mother. The answer depends on whose circles they are, which is the point of drawing them around one person.
Bronfenbrenner later developed this model into his bioecological model, which adds the role of biology. Have students add one biological factor to Maya’s circles, such as her health, and argue where it belongs when none of the rings was drawn for it.
One of our conceptual framework examples, a Purdue PhD on Latine adolescents’ depressive symptoms and use of mental health care, builds its framework on a model that grows out of Bronfenbrenner’s work.
Sources
- Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
- Ecological systems theory. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 9, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_systems_theory
- Riser, D., Spielman, R., & Biek, D. (2024). Lifespan development. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/lifespan-development/pages/1-4-contexts-and-settings-of-development
