Approaches employed by sixth-graders to compare rival solutions in socio-scientific decision-making tasks Nicos Papadouris, Constantinos P. Constantinou * Learning in Science Group, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus Received 15 May 2008; revised 31 August 2008; accepted 18 February 2009 Abstract The present study explores the approaches employed by sixth-grade students to compare rival solutions in socio-scientific decision-making situations. Data were collected using three specially developed open-ended tasks. Two of them were administered to 96 students in a written form while the third was administered to 20 of these students through individual follow-up interviews. Our findings suggest that students failed to consistently apply coherent decision-making approaches. Instead, they employed a diversity of approaches ranging from non-compensatory strategies that avoided tradeoffs between advantages and disadvantages of rival solutions, to strategies that sought to synthesize these two aspects, though in an invalid manner. We demonstrate that these strategies are the outcome of a number of prevalent reasoning difficulties. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Socio-scientific issues; Decision-making; Strategies; Reasoning 1. Introduction Decision-making constitutes a very common cognitive process that is brought to bear on diverse aspects of our life. Sometimes, decisions happen to be trivial and are, therefore, made without serious cognitive effort. In other cases, decisions are vitally important and need to be thoroughly considered. Such cases are becoming increasingly common in modern democratic societies and, partly, as a result, the development of decision-making skills has come to be recognized as a major objective of education (Baron & Brown, 1991). Despite their broad range of applicability, decision-making skills have received consistent attention from science educa- tion and there is broad consensus on their value in this domain (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 1993; Bybee, 1987; Driver, Leach, Millar, & Scott, 1996; Jenkins, 1994; Millar, 1996; National Research Council [NRC], 1996). However, there is a clear lack of more specific references on how decision-making skills could be integrated with particular topics of the science curriculum and be addressed as a significant learning objective. It is also worth noting the lack of teaching innovations in this domain, espe- cially on the reasoning components of decision-making. Despite the many useful ideas that have been proposed (Campbell, Lofstrom, & Jerome, 1997; Edelson, Tarnoff, Schwille, Bruozas, & Switzer, 2006; Ratcliffe, 1997), there is particularly poor understanding about how to integrate deci- sion-making strategies in the aims and objectives of the science curriculum. The present study was embedded within a wider project, which set out to develop curriculum materials in this domain. These materials were targeted at helping students aged 11e15 to develop a specific reasoning strategy for comparing rival solutions in multi-attribute, socio-scientific, decision-making situations; this strategy rests on the idea that all available data should be synthesized through combining strengths and weak- nesses and making tradeoffs, as needed, so as to determine the most appropriate solution overall. Within this project, curric- ulum development is conceived of as an evidence-driven process that combines empirical research and technological innovation. The latter component includes the development of * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ357 22753758; fax: þ357 22753702. E-mail addresses: npapa@ucy.ac.cy (N. Papadouris), c.p.constantinou@ ucy.ac.cy (C.P. Constantinou). 0959-4752/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.learninstruc.2009.02.022 Learning and Instruction 20 (2010) 225e238 www.elsevier.com/locate/learninstruc