Describing Decisions through Decision Trees

The purpose this lesson is to teach students to think through their decisions and depict those decisions through a decision tree.

Choices: Twenty questions, choosing a book to read, figuring out what number someone was thinking (between 1 to 100), identifying what animal someone is thinking of (in a small set), or any other choice between a small set (i.e. planets, missions, flowers, trees, states, countries).

Or: making choices - which instrument to play, etc. In this case, make a pros and cons list for each item, then use that to create the decision tree.

• Students will be able to identify the list of possible outcomes they are deciding between
• Students will be able to group items into items with some similar characteristics
• Students will be able to identify questions that divide the items into successively smaller groups.
• Students will be able to draw a diagram depicting the sequence of questions leading to each possible outcome.

Activity:

High level introduction: Many studies have shown that people have a very difficult time making decisions when faced with too many choices. They get paralyzed with indecision because there are too many factors to decide between. In fact, we can typically only make good decisions when faced with no more than 7 choices.

But what if you want to read a book, and you walk into a library that holds 10,000 books? How do you choose between them? You group the books into large categories and choose between a small number of categories before considering individual books.

Exercise for the students (pre-, post- survey):