Learning to Make Systematic Decisions.

Byline: Daniel C. Edelson, Adam Tarnoff, Kathleen Schwille, Meridith Bruozas, Anna Switzer Ricky Layson, Forest Resource Consultants, Inc., www.forestryimages. org How do communities deal with the needs of a growing population? How do they manage limited resources like land, energy, and water? How do they balance the needs of humans against the needs of native ecosystems? Our curriculum approach confronts these questions and more by embedding science learning in the context of realistic societal decisions. This approach uses decisions as a context to motivate and guide science learning, while simultaneously teaching students to make systematic decisions about issues with societal implications. In this article, we describe why a teacher may want to use decision making as a teaching strategy, outline a structure for teaching decision making, and provide an example of how we have integrated decision making with content in an environmental science curriculum. We use the following example: How would your community respond if the only suitable location to build a new school is the habitat for a threatened species of tortoise? Teaching decision making While teaching students science content and inquiry practices is important, it is not sufficient to prepare students to make well-reasoned decisions (Arvai et al. 2004); they must also learn decision-making skills. To be effective, instruction on decision making should be based on an understanding of how thoughtful decisions are made and common pitfalls of the decision-making process (Allen 2000; Arvai et al. 2004). Decisions we make in our communities today have far-reaching, even global, impact. For example, 21st-century society members must make personal and political decisions about diet, lifestyle, healthcare, transportation, housing, and consumption that have personal, societal, and environmental impacts. To make decisions wisely, members of modern society must assess the implications of a decision, such as costs, and the impact on individuals, communities, and the environment. They must also evaluate implications systematically in light of their values. To help students develop these skills, we have created an instructional approach based on a decision-making process that we call the Stakeholder Consequences Decision-Making (SCDM) process (see "The SCDM process''). This instructional approach has four primary goals: Provide students with a meaningful context for understanding science and scientific practices. Help students learn to establish decision-making criteria and identify the consequences of a decision. Provide students with a framework for applying personal values to their understanding of consequences in order to make a decision. Provide teachers with an opportunity to assess students' understandings of science and decision making. The SCDM process. The SCDM process consists of four stages: establishing constraints and considerations; identifying consequences; assessing impacts on stakeholders; and weighing impacts on stakeholders. Establishing constraints and considerations The first stage of the SCDM process establishes basic criteria for the decision regarding desired outcomes. In our process, students identify two types of criteria: constraints and considerations. Constraints are essential outcomes, and considerations are desired outcomes (see Figure 1, below, for examples of both). At this stage, some options may be eliminated based on failure to meet constraints, and the others may be ranked based on how they fare on considerations (Figure 2, below). Identifying consequences In the second stage, students apply their understanding of the underlying science to assess the consequences of different options for the decision. To record consequences, students create a diagram called a cascading consequences chart, which is a diagram displaying chains of causes and effects stemming from a particular option (Figure 3, below). …