Exploring adolescent decision making about equity: Ill-structured problem solving in social studies

Abstract The nature of adolescent decision making was investigated using a task that hinged on gender equity, a central concept in citizen education classrooms. Eighteen 10th-grade students were individually interviewed and asked to make a decision about allocating scholarship money to four pairs of fictional candidates seeking either nursing or engineering degrees. The candidates in each pair differed on various dimensions, including major, GPA, and financial need. Interviews were audiorecorded and transcribed for qualitative analyses. The model that emerged from the data revealed that adolescent decision making is a constructive and recursive process, and the students’ simplistic notions of equity inhibited the search for alternatives and their evaluation. The findings point to the important relationship between concept representation and social reasoning.

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