Teaching Decision Making to Adolescents: A Critical Review

In a rapidly changing world where individuals have great autonomy, citizens must be able to make independent decisions effectively. This is especially true for adolescents who :ace such important decisicr's as whether to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, stay in school, follow their parents' advice, and hangout with different crowds. To meet this challenge, many programs have recently been developed to teach decision making to adolescents. In some cases, better decision making is an end in itsAf. In other cases, it is a means toward encouraging particular choices (e.g., to avoid sex, to stay in school). A sample of the best developed of these programs is described and evaluated hore, with in a conceptual framework derived from formal and behavioral theories of decision making. The intemal validity of these programs is evaluated in terms of how adequately they cover the normatively prescribed steps to good decision making and how sensitive their pedagogy is to the descriptive research into how people intuitively make judgments and decisions. Generally speaking, the programs cover the prescriptive steps fairly well, while largely ignoring the descriptive research. The external validity of the programs is analyzed in terms of the evlluation studies that have been performed on each. A typical evaluation involves asking participants whether they endorse various principles of decision making (e.g., am the sort of person who lists a lot of alternatives before I make a decision:). Although improvement in this sense loes show that students have listened to the curriculum, it provides no guarantee that they are actually behaving differently or even have different attitudes as opposed just to saying what they think their teachers want to hear. These Questionnaires also use a technical vocabulary that control subjects could not know (and use), even if they had the same attitudes. Many of these curricula have considerable face validity Their underlying principles seem plausible. Their implementation is often imaginative Many of the classes seem as thQugh they teach useful lessons and would be fun to take The fact that they h3ve gotten as far a., they have shows enormous commitment and ingenuity However, making a stronger case for cdopting any of these programs requires greater atte tic n to both their pedagogical underpinnings and their measurable impacts on behavior.