Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to provide preliminary observations regarding the usage of an online learning environment designed to improve students’ decision making skills. This learning environment is a product of a 3-year large scale project carried out in Turkey. This project accomplished two goals; First, we adapted the Preadolescent Decision Making Competence Test (PA-DMCT), originally developed by Weller, Levin, Rose, and Bossard (2012) to identify decision making skills of children between 9-13 years old, to Turkish. Second, we designed and tested an online learning environment that enabled students to experience a variety of real-life decision making situations.

On the basis of research illustrating that model examples help to teach complex cognitive skills, we aim at using model examples in teaching middle school students how to make real life decisions. Video based model examples related to Ethics and Security unit, a part of 6th grade ICT and Programming course, were developed. Each example was structured based on two models, namely Decision Quality Chain developed by Decision Education Foundation and Zimmerman’s (2000) Self-Regulation Model, as self-regulation skills have been considered as fundamental skills for effective decision making. During the 2019-2020 Fall semester, the online learning environment was implemented in a middle school in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. A total of 150 6th grade students used the learning environment for 4 weeks. This paper aims at providing the researchers’ observations of student interactions with the learning environment, as well as students’ reflections on the process.

Acknowledgement:
This work has been fully supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey under the project 116K149.

Keywords:

Decision making skills, self-regulation, self-regulation strategies, online learning.