Decision Education Across Disciplines
Paper Topics and Key Insights from Decision Education Research Collaborative Members
Navigating Misinformation Through Decision Education
“Emerging research suggests that proficiency in their Decision Education (DE) domain of Thinking Probabilistically, specifically numeracy, could reduce misinformation endorsement related to confirmation bias and anchoring” (e.g., Pennycook & Rand, 2019b; Shoots-Reinhard et al., 2021; Sinayev & Peters, 2015; Stanley et al., 2021).
“Debiasing efforts can aid in fostering a culture of critical thinkers and evidence-based reasoners who are essential in building a resilient society. Taken together, addressing cognitive biases has the potential to not only help quell the spread of misinformation but also aid in more informed decision-making across a wide range of domains.”
Why Might Young Learners Struggle With (Some Kinds of) Decision-Making?
Richard E. Ahl, Natasha Chaku, Elizabeth Lapidow, Azzurra Ruggeri, & Caren Walker
“. . . understanding the adaptive roots of children’s decision-making approaches can inform how children’s decision-making is taught and evaluated.”
“Much as adolescents’ seemingly suboptimal tendencies toward risk-taking have been conceptualized as adaptive given the context of adolescence (Icenogle & Cauffman, 2021), tendencies which seem suboptimal from the perspective of decision-making can be viewed as reflecting adaptive tendencies within the context of childhood’s goals as a particular stage of development.”
Decision Literacy: Defining the Critical Function of Reading, Writing, Talking, and Storytelling in the Improvement of Decision-Making
“. . . The single largest database about decision-making can be found in the archives of world literature.”
“While there is general agreement—and empirical evidence—that exposure to great works of literature is beneficial to both the individual and the community (Boyd, 2009; Dutton, 2009; Donald, 1991; Kuiken et al., 2004; Oatley, 2011; van Peer et al., 2007), almost no research exists on the impact of such exposure on the individual’s ability to make thoughtful decisions in their personal, professional, and civic lives.”
Using Games to Support Attentional Control and Decision-Making Skills in Adolescence
“Given the importance of attentional control and decision-making for adolescent outcomes, strategies to better assess and optimize these skills can help researchers and educators develop methods to support students in real-world contexts, such as school, at home, and in the community (Nutley et al., 2011; Rueda et al., 2005).”
“Assessments delivered as games also have more potential to capture complex forms of cognition, including the multidimensional and interactive nature of attention and decision-making skills, rather than assessing them in isolation (Day et al., 2019).”
Decision Education in Sports: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Improving Athlete Decision-Making
“. . . athletes must respond effectively in a micro decision environment, on the order of seconds or even milliseconds. Those athletes who move, react, and decide faster have an advantage. This implies the need for improved decision quality while under time pressure for sporting success (Anderson et al., 2017). In this sort of context, how could Decision Education help individual athletes or teams gain a competitive advantage (Raab, 2007)?”
“Decision Education compatible tools and methods can help speed up these learning processes. Indeed, a recent meta-analysis covering six large-scale randomized controlled studies examined the efficacy of interventions meant to improve decision-making in a variety of sports including volleyball, basketball, handball, and soccer (Silva et al., 2021). . .the results of the meta-analysis showed that such interventions robustly led to improved tactical understanding and tactical awareness in game situations for athletes.”
“Our recent pilot lab data has shown that it is indeed possible to significantly increase the scanning behavior of youth soccer players (aged 9–10) by targeting ‘the habit loop’ (Duhigg, 2013; Wood & Rünger, 2016) involving a cue, routine, and reward.”
Distinguishing Between Correlation and Causation: Implications for Decision Education
“. . . conflating correlation and causation is one of the most ubiquitous errors people make when evaluating data and evidence, both among students (Norris et al., 2003; Mueller & Coon, 2013; Bleske-Rechek et al., 2015; Seifert et al., 2023; List, 2024) and laypeople (Xiong et al., 2020; Adams et al., 2017; Michal & Shah, in preparation (a)). This widespread reasoning error has important consequences for people’s decisions—people may be easily misled by correlational evidence and erroneously incorporate changes to their personal lives, workplace, or policies that are not causally related to a desired outcome (and are thus ineffective).”
“To support Decision Education, teaching students to discriminate between correlation and causation may thus be taught most effectively using an interdisciplinary approach at multiple timepoints throughout the middle and high school years, perhaps incorporating lessons from media literacy, data science, and health/nutrition in addition to traditional math and science courses.”
Empowering Adolescents Through Decision Education: A Pathway for Informed Career Choice
“. . . the Decision Education framework (Alliance for Decision Education, 2023) provides a more comprehensive, adaptive, and practical approach to prepare adolescents for career decision-making.”
“As such, integrating Decision Education (Alliance for Decision Education, 2023) into the academic curriculum or extracurricular programs offers a profound opportunity to empower adolescents, equipping them with the tools necessary to navigate their future careers and life decisions with confidence and clarity.”
Challenges and Opportunities of Technology for Decision-Making and Decision Education
“However, despite the ubiquity of technology in the lives of adolescence and the empirically recognized decision-making development in this population, the impact of technology on adolescents’ decision-making is not well articulated.”
“. . . studies have shown that adolescents have difficulties exerting self-control, have heightened sensitivity to emotions, are mostly interested in the present with little thought about the future, and are more likely to take risks (e.g., Casey & Caudle, 2013). All of these behaviors are in play when adolescents interact with technologies, particularly those that provide access to information and social interaction.”
From Theory to Practice: Mapping Decision Education Frameworks to Numeracy, Scientific Reasoning, Media Literacy, Food Decisions, and Debiasing Interventions
Numeracy: “The state of the literature on numeracy calls for more causal studies on numeracy on decision-making in general and on children in particular. The voluminous correlational research suggests that training students in math, specifically probabilistic reasoning, is likely to improve the skills of students to make accurate predictions, better choices, and avoid biases in domains related to probability or involving numbers.”
Scientific reasoning: “. . . teaching students how to discern the quality of evidence (e.g., differentiating between observational and experimental evidence; identifying threats to internal and external validity) may help them be more critical consumers of science and effectively apply scientific findings to everyday decisions.”
Media literacy: “Media literacy education is proposed as an intervention whose pedagogy targets increasing student’s abilities to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act by using information with and for specific outcomes (Aufderheide, 1993; NAMLE, 2023). . . examples of these tenets include identifying claims made in media messages and evaluating the veracity of those claims using evidence, along with interrogating media messages to discern how they can be used to drive polarization and build coalitions around shared ideas. These same concepts, among others, are also shared in a broader context with those of the frameworks of Decision Education.”
Food decisions: “Understanding how to help children make better food choices is crucial, given rising obesity rates and the decline in children’s physical activity (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022; World Health Organization, 2021), and as emphasized also by John and Chaplin’s (2022) review of 50 years of research about children. Understanding children’s food choice from a young age is especially important, as preferences established in the early years can persist even into adulthood (Nicklaus et al., 2004; Connell, Brucks, and Nielsen, 2014; Mittal, Griskevicius, and Haws, 2020).”
Debiasing: “Decision Education lends itself to teaching both nudging and boosting as valid methods that could be effective in promoting better decision-making. Indeed, as we describe below, both nudges, such as using choice architecture to support Structuring Decisions, and boosts, such as improving numeracy to support Thinking Probabilistically, are already incorporated into Decision Education Learning Domains. It is also worth knowing which methods (nudging or boosting) are more effective in which contexts, both in terms of efficacy when applied, but also in terms of take-up (e.g., which approach are students more likely to adopt and implement of their own volition).”
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