Our mission is to improve lives by empowering students with essential skills and dispositions for making better decisions.
Who we are
The Alliance for Decision Education (the Alliance) is a national nonprofit and field builder with the mission of improving lives by empowering students with essential skills and dispositions for making better decisions. Founded in 2014 and backed by experts in decision sciences and a broad range of other fields—including several Nobel laureates—the Alliance believes that better decisions lead to better lives and a better society.
As a field builder, the Alliance aligns, coordinates, and amplifies the efforts of organizations and individuals working toward the vision of Decision Education being part of every student’s learning experience. We partner with teachers, researchers, academic and business leaders, families, and community members to raise awareness and develop solutions that can be scaled in classrooms across the country.
Why this is so important
Our life outcomes are a result of a combination of chance and the quality of our decisions. Though we can’t control chance, we can teach students how to make better decisions. Decision science, a field that has developed over 60 years, has demonstrated that we can get better at making decisions through learning and practice.
Through Decision Education, students acquire skills and dispositions like thinking probabilistically, resisting cognitive biases, using a decision framework, and practicing open-mindedness, updating one’s beliefs, truth-seeking, intellectual humility, self-awareness, and problem-solving.
This isn’t about abstract concepts; it’s about developing applied skills that can change the trajectory of a student’s life. Sound judgment, agency, empathy, and tolerance for diverse perspectives are essential to flourishing in our ever-changing world. Decision Education empowers students with these skills and more, so that they can become engaged citizens, make informed decisions, and drive positive change within their communities while growing as individuals. The impact is exponential.
