An Educational Framework for Decision-Making and Problem-Solving

Abstract

Considering the importance of promoting students' critical thinking in environmental education, we focused on developing an educational framework for promoting private decision-making making, in other words, for judgment. First, articles with suggestions for doing so, published in Environmental Education Research and the Journal of Environmental Education during the last 15 years, were reviewed for worldwide trends. Additionally, those from the Japanese Journal of Environmental Education were reviewed for Japanese trends. Treatises with keywords such as judgment or decision-making were quite limited. Referring to the few treatises related to development of an educational framework for decision-making or judgment, we proposed a framework of five steps: 1) designing alternatives to judge between/among, 2) listing potential perspectives for judging alternatives, 3) organizing and categorizing potential perspectives into a minimum number of perspectives, 4) judging (selecting an alternative) from each perspective, and 5) comprehensive judging (selecting an alternative). Based on this educational framework for judgment, sample teaching materials for judging the necessity of using nuclear power in Japan were developed and tested. These obtained the desired level of usefulness and appropriateness of the teaching material, and involving more samples in future research based on the appropriateness of the framework of this study would confirm these results.

Keywords

• education to promote judgment
• use of nuclear power
• critical thinking
• environmental education