Teaching Decision Making To Adolescents

Jonathan Baron, Rex V. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136466601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book describes a variety of programs -- firmly based in psychological theory and modern decision analysis -- that are suitable for teaching adolescents how to improve both their own decision making skills and their understanding of the decision making of others. Providing practical advice as well as theoretical analysis, this volume addresses general questions such as the nature and rationale of the enterprise, its implementation, and its evaluation. Relevant to several current adolescent problems including drug abuse, this is an excellent source, either as research, new curriculum, or enrichment of old curriculum.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Jonathan Baron
University of Pennsylvania

Rex V. Brown
Decision Science Consortium, Inc.
Reston, VA

SCOPE OF BOOK

Motivation

It is easy to find decisions that turn out badly. Teenagers get pregnant, couples enter into marriages that end in divorce or physical conflict, national leaders promulgate policies that drive their own (or other) countries into ruin, citizens vote for leaders who do this, and we all waste time and money in countless ways.

The chapters in this book assume that bad outcomes often result from poorly made decisions. By teaching people to make better decisions, we can improve their lives. By teaching decision making to adolescents, we have a chance to influence the decision making of a much broader range of citizens than those who attend college. We also have a chance to influence decision making before many bad decisions are made.

The chapters here are concerned with methods of instruction in decision making that could be used with adolescents. The book is directed primarily to those who want to attempt such instruction, either as new curriculum, as enrichment of traditional curriculum, or as research. It is thus directed to teachers, teachers in training, educational researchers, and research students. The book attempts to answer several questions about decision making suggested by an old saw: Is it broke? Can we fix it? What will it take? How can we tell if it's fixed? The bulk of the discussion concerns the “What will it take?” question.

Structure of Chapters

The book begins with a wide-ranging chapter (Beyth-Marom, Fischhoff, Jacobs, & Furby) that reviews literature in the field and previous teaching efforts (some of which are described elsewhere in the book).

This is followed by reports on two of the most significant courses yet developed. Mann, Harmoni, and Power report on GOFER, an Australia-based 50-hour course, which may be the most extensive effort to date dedicated solely to teaching decision skills to children. Adams and Feehrer report on the decision component of ODYSSEY, an ambitious thinking skills program developed as an experiment in Venezuela and now widely adopted elsewhere.

Three chapters then describe a teaching program developed under a grant to Decision Science Consortium, Inc. (see Acknowledgments), which we call the DSC project. These chapters comprise a conceptual framework of pedagogy and evaluation (Baron & Brown), and a description and appraisal of pilot courses (Laskey & Campbell; Baron & Graumlich).

The next five chapters report on distinctive supplementary approaches to instruction. Elias, Branden-Muller, and Sayette complements the normative-cognitive orientation of the above courses with attention to the role of emotions in decision. Shanteau, Grier, Johnson, and Berner focus on training anchored to realistic familiar choices. Martin and Brown explore the use of balance beams and Williams the use of stories as pedagogical devices. Swets proposes a statistical (Bayesian) inference approach to the uncertainty element of decisions. Campbell and Laskey address the issue of implementing a decision-making program in the schools. Finally, Wheeler, in addition to describing his own pioneering effort, provides a provocative perspective on the whole enterprise.

The chapters overlap considerably in the issues they address, but they represent a fairly rich variety of perspectives on these issues. Following is an overview of some of the main themes.

ADOLESCENT DECISION MAKING: IS IT DEFICIENT AND, IF SO, HOW?

All authors subscribe to the view, propounded by the Post article in the Prologue, that deficient decision making is a serious problem throughout society at large and that the problem needs addressing in childhood or adolescence.

Beyth-Marom and colleagues, Baron and Brown, and Shanteau and colleagues cite evidence from laboratory experiments in decision making as well as evidence of apparent poor decisions in the real world.

Shanteau and colleagues focus on some specific problems of nurses in training. They had found that nurses, when making decisions, tended to gather too much information, to overestimate the risk of drug addiction when medicating patients for pain, and to use habitual, inflexible heuristics rather than responding to the particulars of a case when making a decision.

Mann and colleagues discuss certain faulty coping patterns: unthinking adherence to an ongoing course of action; unthinking change to a new course of action; defensive avoidance of making choices; and hypervigilance (“panic”). Elias and colleagues also focus on the role of emotions, assuming that children need to be taught to recognize the emotions they experience and the effects of these emotions on their decisions.

Baron and Brown point to the lack of “actively open-minded thinking” as a fundamental problem in decision making.

To a considerable extent, these various views of the problem are not in conflict. Instead, they represent different levels of description of the same phenomena, or attempts to flesh out a simple explanation. The faulty coping mechanisms described by Mann and colleagues for example, are possible causes of failure to think with active open-mindedness, and the errors discussed by Shanteau and colleagues could result from such failure in particular areas.

HOW SHOULD DEFICIENCIES IN DECISION MAKING BE CORRECTED?

Most of the approaches described in this book try to teach, at least implicitly, normative models of decision making. These are idealized methods of analysis. They are similar to methods of formal analysis used by professionals and taught in business schools and medical schools (e.g., Brown, Kahr, & Peterson, 1974; von Winterfeldt & Edwards, 1986; Watson & Buede, 1987). In the main, courses (including DSC's) emphasize the qualitative consideration of the underlying factors of goals, options, and uncertainty.

Several programs (DSC; Adams & Feehrer; Mann et al.; Shanteau et al.) emphasize the analysis of decisions into multiattribute tables, in which each of several options is evaluated on each of several attributes or dimensions. The value of each option on each attribute can be represented by a number or by some other symbol such as + or + + +. Use of such tables in decision making requires (explicit or implicit) assignment of weights to various attributes. Multiattribute tables are closely related to the decisional balance sheet, a technique invented by Benjamin Franklin, revived by Janis and Mann (1977), and used by Mann and colleagues and Wheeler in their chapters here.

If multiattribute tables are to be used in the analysis of everyday decisions, students must be able to apply the concepts of outcome, attribute, and importance to the sorts of verbal descriptions of decisions that they would naturally provide themselves. Williams addresses the construction of hypothetical scenarios that can be used as examples, and the way in which students understand those scenarios. Most of the programs described here use such scenarios for both instruction and testing, and they are often presented in printed form. Many students have difficulty comprehending such scenarios whether they are presented in text or speech. Williams examines these comprehension difficulties, and she reports on a training program designed to overcome these difficulties by training students to recognize a general problem-solving schema. She also makes suggestions that will be useful to those who want to integrate the teaching of decision making into “language arts.”

Multiattribute tables are analogous to tables analyzing decisions into options and uncertain events, as used by the DSC group and Shanteau and colleagues. If options are listed in the columns, then the rows consist of uncertain events that could affect the outcome, such as whether the weather will be sun, rain, or snow. An outcome is placed in each cell of the table, and a utility value can be assigned to that outcome.

Martin and Brown explore the use of an analog representation of two-option decisions, the balance beam, which can represent both multiattribute and probabilistic decisions. The critical idea here is that of the weighted sum. For probabilistic decisions, the utility of each outcome is represented by the distance of the weight from the center, and the probability is represented by the numerical weight. The force pulling down on each side is a weighted sum. For multiattribute tables, the numerical weights can correspond to the importance of each attribute, and the distances can correspond to the utility of an option on the attribute in question.

Adams and Feehrer's decision-making program is part of a larger course in thinking called ODYSSEY. One general theme of the course is the value of analysis, and the decision-making component is no exception. Like other chapters, this one emphasizes the relation between decision making and thinking in general.

Swets describes some ways in which certain formal approaches to inference, as an element of decision making, can be incorporated into a high-school math course. These exercises serve two purposes. First, they help to directly counter a variety of errors that people make in situations that involve repeated decisions. For example, Peterson and Uhela (1964) found that subjects asked to guess which of two events will occur will not always guess the most likely event, but will instead tend to match the frequency of their guesses to the frequency of the events, even when the events are obviously unpredictable. Swets's classroom exercises will directly demonstrate the futility of such a strategy. More generally, it will demonstrate that using probability as a guide to action is often the best we can do.

The second purpose of the exercises is to introduce students to the Bayesian approach to probability and statistics as branches of mathematics. Here, the materials are not very relevant to students’ everyday lives, but they are highly relevant to those students who go on to study mathematics in college and to those who enter various professions. The Bayesian approach is becoming more important and more widely recognized in medicine, science, and even law (e.g., Tillers & Green, 1988).

Shanteau and his colleagues review their efforts to train nurses to overcome certain specific errors in decision making. This project, like most others reviewed here, tries to identify problems before correcting them. Although the teaching was done with trainee nurses, it is a sort of instruction, and a sort of approach, that could be applied much earlier.

One method that is common to most programs is the use of a general heuristic framework for thinking about decisions. This is not a formal analytic method, but a set of things to consider when faced with a decision. Mann and colleagues use the acronym GOFER to remind students to consider “goals, options, facts, effects, and review.” The DSC project used GOOP to stand for “goals, options, outcomes, and probabilities.” Individual lessons can focus on different aspects of the framework, but students can be reminded that the whole framework is always potentially worth thinking about.

Other approaches focus more on the emotional impediments to good decision making. The chapter by Maurice Elias and his colleagues represents an important tradition that we might call “social problem solving,” which is concerned with development and with problems that begin in childhood, such as poor relationships with peers. In addition to the works Elias cites, Spivack and Shure (1985) are important advocates of this tradition. Its origins go back to John Dewey, but it has been developed by clinical psychologists, so along the way it has come to be more concerned with emotional factors than Dewey would have been (although he did not neglect the emotions). The approach is related to various schools of “cognitive behavior therapy” or just “cognitive therapy” for individuals, but the goal of Elias's program is prevention as well as treatment.

What this tradition has in common with other approaches represented in this book is its emphasis on thinking about decisions that come up, by considering alternative options, possible consequences of those options, and values. (Here, the values are often emotional.) The common assumption is that children, adolescents, and adults too often fail to “stop and think.” The tradition differs from some other approaches in its emphasis on emotions. Children are taught to recognize and describe their feelings in social situations as an early and important part of training in decision making. Emotions are seen as important indicators that there is a problem to be solved.

The approach taken by Mann and colleagues also emphasizes explicit instruction about social and emotional effects on decision making and how to avoid them, for unthinking adherence to a course of action can result from social influence, and hypervigilance can result from fear.

Like Mann and colleagues, Wheeler was inspired in part by the work of Janis and Mann (1977). Although Wheeler's efforts were the earliest of those described, his chapter comes at the end because it provides a reflective overview of the whole field, comparing the problem-solving and decision-making perspectives with other “metaphors” that might on occasion be just as useful as views of the world.

A unique feature of the Elias and colleagues approach is the use of role-taking exercises in which students practice putting themselves in the position of another person or even an object. This is an implicit recognition of the moral aspects of decision making. (Another recognition in the same program is the emphasis on considering feelings of others as well as oneself.) Other attempts to incorporate moral elements of decision making are found in the DSC lesson concerned with “Self and others,” (see Laskey & Campbell) and in the decisional balance sheet used by Mann and colleagues and by Wheeler, which explicitly asks the student to consider intangible consequences and consequences for others as well as tangible consequences for the self. The incorporation of moral components into decision-making instruction is, we believe, a rich field for further research.

EVALUATING SUCCESS

Most of the approaches described in this book have been subjected to some degree of evaluation, but almost none have got very far toward testing for, much less demonstrating, beneficial impact on the quality of real-world decision-making. That is the objective we are primarily concerned with.

It would not be surprising, nor particularly discouraging, if, in fact, these pioneering, typically short, courses did not produce much improvement in how their graduates made significant choices in their lives. After all, only one of them, GOFER, had more than about a dozen class units devoted specifically to the decision process. (Other skills of arguably comparable significance to a youngster's development, such as English, are taught to them daily throughout their school careers.)

Not much can therefore be expected by way of efforts to measure such improvement, given the difficulty (discussed in Baron & Brown) of establishing decision quality and attributing any of it to one among many determinants—in this case an introductory decision skills course.

Formal Evaluations of Teaching Effects

Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to expect progress toward this goal in measurable respects. Several attempts have been made to formally compare treatment and control groups in some of these respects, for courses discussed in this book. The tests vary greatly in their ambitiousness and therefore in the interest of their findings.

Reproduction of Course Material. The weakest, but most straightforward and prevalent, evaluations basically called for verbal self-reports from students o...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Prologue: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Author Index
• Subject Index