[Link] The Decision Education Foundation
Among Michael Anissimov’s recent Delicious links, I spotted The Decision Education Foundation. It seems to be relevant to our interest in spreading rationality and bringing up young rationalists, but I hadn’t seen it shared or discussed before and just thought I’d share it.
There is an urgent need for young people to understand how to make better decisions. High school dropout numbers, substance abuse, and violence are some of the visible signs of poor decision making among many young people in the U.S. In addition, mainstream students are failing to reach their full academic and personal potential because they lack good decision-making skills. They’re facing an increasingly complex, risky, and uncertain future in which these skills will be more important than ever.
Yet decision skills training is missing in the majority of today’s school curricula.
To answer this urgent and critical need and to provide this missing link in schools and youth programs, the Decision Education Foundation (DEF) was created in 2001 by educators, decision scientists, and management consultants with a passion for education and a commitment to bring decision education to today’s youth.
Since then, DEF’s founders, staff, and volunteers have been designing and delivering training opportunities and teaching materials for educators and youth mentors who desire to increase self-esteem, build better critical thinking skills, and give students more power over their academic and personal lives through better decision skills.
and not just young people and not just in the US. Arguably, even the DEF’s choices are not so hot, either, otherwise why would it still languish in obscurity 10 years after founding? (any similarities to SIAI are purely coincidental).
I tried to find something on their web site that wasn’t either cringe-inducing disingenuous “Hey kids, learn about how to make good peer-to-teen choice decisions!!” hype—which very students take seriously—or really vague pimping for the wonders that lie beyond the pay-wall. They sound like every other well-intentioned but ultimately farcical attempt to teach a Great New Thing to a captive audience of middle- and high-school students who probably won’t get much out of it. Remember the New Math? This sounds like the New Math. Exactly like it.
I know this is a pretty harsh thing to say about a curriculum that I haven’t read about in any detail—no such detail is available on their web site—but I remember what school was like. It was littered with curriculum modules that sounded good in theory, but worked about as well in execution as a broadsword made of cheddar.
So all you’re doing is signalling some prior you have? What supports your prior over an uninformative one?
False.
Generalizing from one example.
The lesson plans you link are behind a paywall.
I didn’t link to a specific lesson plan. There is an overview of each lesson that gives the general drift. There are also some case studies that are necessarily fluffy, but provide more detail.
Saying one should ignore it all and fall back on their prior seems lazy.
Is this the overview you were referring to? I don’t see any details (other than the presence of a video) that give me any real information about the lesson that would distinguish it from what I would have used for a prior.
I should have said lesson plans though, I’ll edit.
There are five sub-headings, the latter two of which have several lessons.
Like this one. And this one.
Maybe it’s because I’ve taught primary students before, but those overviews by themselves give me enough information to understand what a lesson along those lines would look like.
I clearly didn’t follow the path of links far enough. I agree that these overviews give much more detail, enough to give a much better idea about the content.
I now agree with you that the original poster should have found these and updated significantly away from a simple prior when assessing how effective the organization is. At the very least I’m noticing activities that are not so terribly cheesy that they turn students off and cross-domain connections at the core of lessons—I would guess that the lessons themselves are worthwhile.
On the other hand, the criticism that “if they can teach you how to make good decisions, why haven’t their decisions made them better off?” seems especially pertinent now.