Newsletters

Breakout Session

DEF Completes Fourth Series of Summer Educator Workshops at Stanford. Teachers, youth counselors, and administrators from across the U.S. gathered at Stanford University in June to learn more about decision education and how to incorporate decision skills training into their programs. In collaboration with the Stanford Center for Professional Development, DEF presented two 2 ½-day courses--Decision Quality for Educators, plus a new advanced course, Decision Quality for Educators: Part II.

• "The knowledge and models presented in this course are essential to the development of healthy people and happy lives."
• "[The workshop] re-defines my commitment to helping kids make better decisions."
• "The information was incredibly valuable and the content was relevant to my work."         
• "Decision Education is an MBA for life."
• "Decision Quality applies to my school's faculty and students. I hope to work with both these groups."

 

Meyers-Briggs Study

• Decision Quality for Educators, DEF's popular basics course, which has been offered at Stanford, in the Philadelphia area, and at various onsite teacher trainings across the country for the past four years.
• Decision Quality for Educators: Part II 
• Teaching Decision Skills in Humanities 
• Improving Advisory and Counseling with Decision Quality
  

With the exception of the new advanced course, all are available online through Stanford's Center for Professional Development. 

Jay Brown (Haverford) receives his certificate

KC STAAR Trainees

DEF continued working with four Iowa schools participating in the federally funded KC STAAR (Keokuk County Schools Tactics for Alcohol Abuse Reduction) program. In June, Senior Program Director Chris Spetzler held a three-day training session during which attendees from DEF's 2009 Stanford workshops shared their experiences teaching DEF material in the classroom. these sessions extended the trained teacher base within the four schools. As a follow-up, DEF is working with students who were exposed to the training to evaluate its impact. 

 
At Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon (the site of DEF's current yearlong evaluation project), eight teachers, counselors, and staff members attended a training workshop given by Chris Spetzler in August. The objective of the workshop was to study the decision-making model by applying it to a current issue and to set the stage for potential future DEF work with the full Thurston teaching staff.

At the 2010 National Teen Success Stakeholders conference in Burlingame, California, Program Director John Frazier gave a Decision Quality fundamentals training for Teen Success facilitators from across the country. Administered by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the TeenSuccess program works directly with pregnant and parenting teens, ages 12-18, offering weekly support group meetings. At the support meetings, participants learn skills to maintain their family size, complete their education, and develop life skills that lead to self-sufficiency.

We are making solid progress with the development of our online* course and expect to have a beta version for review by students and teachers before year-end. Targeted at students in late middle and early high school (a critical stage in academic and emotional development), the online course will present the basics of good decision making using a variety of interactive teaching devices.

Our goal is to create an engaging experience designed for direct delivery to students. Complementary classroom exercises and a teacher's guide will be included in the course to enhance and reinforce the online experience. We believe that this leveraging of available technology will simplify the adoption of decision education by providing wider and lower-cost distribution of DEF's materials.

We've been working with young people, educators, e-learning developers, and decision science professionals to make our vision a reality, and to ensure that the DEF online course motivates and engages teens, meeting them "where they are."

Stay Tuned! It looks like we're almost there--with the launch of a pilot program scheduled for early January.

*DEF's research indicates that an engaging Internet-based course is a powerful means of reaching young people quickly and effectively. In fact, the popularity of online courses as an instructional delivery method is growing daily, with a prediction by education experts that half of all K-12 students in the U.S. will be taking courses online in the next decade.

Every year, millions of students face the decision of where to attend college--or whether to attend college at all. For most young people, these decisions are unprecedented in complexity and importance, and in the anxiety created among students and their families. They are also unprecedented in terms of the typical family's expenditures for such items as test preparation, counseling, campus visits, etc.

Although the college decision market receives substantial attention from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, statistics suggest that existing advisory programs leave something to be desired--only 56 percent of students entering a four-year college or university graduate in six years; only 28 percent of students entering community college graduate in three years; and 24 percent of first-time freshmen do not return for their sophomore year. [NCES, IPED 2007 Enrollment Survey].

The DEF Solution. DEF's workshop for students and parents will provide families the tools they need to organize and execute their college decision-making process. Our approach departs from the usual standard--instead of focusing on gathering information about colleges, it will focus on how to arrive at the highest quality decision about where to apply and once accepted, where to attend. We have designed a three-part course, emphasizing the elements of decision quality, with "Frame and Values" in the first part, "Alternatives and Information" in the second, and "Sound Reasoning and Commitment to Follow Through" in the third. Ideally, these will be spread out across a student's sophomore and junior years in order to align with the overall college preparation process.

We held our first pilot session on October 2 in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. The audience consisted of approximately 50 students and their parents, all of whom have expressed a strong commitment to attending college.

Decision Quality Fundamentals Booklet Now Available in Spanish. DEF has released a Spanish version of its cornerstone publication, Decision Quality: The Fundamentals of Making Good Decisions. Written by decision science practitioners Tom Keelin, Paul Schoemaker, and Carl Spetzler, the booklet introduces the key concepts, knowledge, and skills necessary to make good decisions. For educators, it can serve as a guide for lesson planning; for students, it can help introduce and reinforce classroom lessons and activities.

Both the English and Spanish editions of the booklet are available on the DEF website.

We've been working for over a year on an important initiative--how to evaluate the efficacy and impact of our decision skills training model. Since its inception, DEF has gathered informal observations and reports from teachers and students regarding the impact of our programs. Now we're beginning to receive the results of a yearlong study performed at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. The study, designed to assess both immediate and longitudial measures, involved a randomly selected experimental and control gorup of students. Initial findings, which we have just received, are very encouraging. We will be examining the data more closely over the next few months.