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Abstracts of Curriulum Units from
Human Decision-Making: Rational and Irrational
A Short Story of Decision-Making
Martha D. Bedeaux
This unit, which integrates economic theories of decision-making into fiction, is designed for high school creative writing students. The link between economics and writing is not strained. Practitioners in both areas are interested in human behavior—to comment, to predict, to question it. Students will study how reason, emotion, common errors and strategic thinking influence human decisions. They will experience the importance of signaling/including details to reveal character. Students will participate in a role-playing game that will allow them to experience many different factors that influence decisions. As they play the game, students will draft a short story using the point of view of their game character. After reading some stories and analyzing the decision making process in them, students will develop authentic characters and produce an original short story.
This curriculum unit focuses on teaching middle school students who are emotionally disturbed and/or behaviorally disordered how to make better choices through the use of economic theory and literature. Students who have this disability are characteristically self-focused and unable to respond to moral arguments of right and wrong, yet correctly choosing between right and wrong typically is one of their greatest challenges. The use of economic theory is ideal as an educational tool because of its ability to examine issues of right and wrong without excessive moral overtones. Through the use of economic theory, I hope to demonstrate to the students how it serves their own self-interest to choose right over wrong.
I have chosen to combine economic theory with examples from literature as a means to providing practice and mastery over the pertinent concepts. These examples include an extensive focus on The Outsiders as well as a mixture from other literary sources, such as Peter Pan, The Giver, Aesop’s Fables, and Lord of the Flies. The unit is grouped into three separate divisions that can be easily implemented according to the skill and interest level of various student populations.
Economic Theory and Media
Literacy
Sara T. Cook
Making sound economic decisions can be a challenge for middle school students who are just trying to fit in no matter what the cost may be. Looking at how creators of media make screen images that creep into our subconscious thoughts is usually exciting and different for these same students. This unit is designed for seventh grade students in an interdisciplinary team setting. Students will study the basic theories of economics followed by a curriculum that takes them through the process of deconstructing media. During this unit the students will learn about the process of decision making. They will learn to read and create graphs and decision trees. Students will look closely at the messages sent to us through media that are trying to make us decide to buy their product. The two theories, economics and media literacy, will be woven together into a final product produced by the students in which they will create an advertisement for a product they believe to be in high demand.
The Actor Process: Using Effective Decision-Making to Develop
Characters
Debi Kierst
The play A Doll's House is used as the basis of a scene study unit in an advanced high school acting class with the focus clearly on the decision-making processes of the author, the characters, and the actors playing the characters. Some of the basic fundamentals and strategies for economic decision-making are employed to further the students' knowledge of effective, rational decision-making, and the students will, hopefully, begin to make connections to their own lives. The unit includes: readings, experiments, and discussions centered around the basic principles and strategies of decision-making; an oral reading of the play which will include an introduction to Henrik Ibsen and 19th century society; and a rehearsal /performance period in which students will prepare scenes for performance using exercises and improvisation to further character development. Assessment will include videotaping of the "in-progress" and final performances and evaluative discussions using a critical analysis rubric as a basis.
The Economics of Decision Making
Jody Ann Lunz
The objective of this curriculum unit is to teach decision making theories, strategies, and obstacles to middle school special education students in a social studies context. This unit is taken from an economics context. The students will learn basic economics through lecture and hands on experiments. They will learn how we make decisions, what gets in our way from making better decisions, and how to help ourselves make better decisions.
The unit uses hands on experiments, real-life modeling, and helps the students evaluate and learn about how they make decisions themselves. The unit uses a lot of vocabulary and is designed to go at the pace of the students. Each lesson (nine in all) can take one to four days depending on student mastery. The experiments are designed to give students a hands on understanding of basic economics and are easy to implement. The unit uses movie scenes to illustrate decision making obstacles, so the students can better understand the concepts. Short readings are also incorporated to help students understand how and why decisions are made.
This would be a good unit to start off the year. The concepts and the students own self evaluations of how they make decisions, could be revisited throughout the school year.
Human Decision-Making: Rationale
for Our Reasoning
Judith A. Mast
This curriculum unit is designed for 8th grade gifted students in the context of literature and language arts. The purpose of the unit is to give the students decision-making tools that they may use for clarifying problems, understanding multiple facets, listing pros and cons, determining the best payoff, setting goals, and prioritizing time and goals. Basic economic principles will be given in the form of models, graphs, experiments, and readings. Students will learn the principles through the readings, film, and lecture, experience the principles in the experiments, apply the concepts in decision trees and other writings, and evaluate the ideas in discussions and essays.
This unit is designed as an introductory unit to start the year. It is to help students bring their own goals and motivations to a conscious level. The length of the unit is approximately four to six weeks. Films and various readings can be added to extend the unit until the concepts are learned. The basics of this unit will be used throughout the year in organizing the students’ work, helping them set priorities, dealing with procrastination and perfectionism, and helping them guide personal choices to the most productive outcomes.
Essential Question: "How Do Choices Affect Our Everyday
Life?"
Erica Pacheco
This unit is designed for a 6th grade special education class where students’ disabilities range from specific learning disabilities to behavior disorders. They will come to learn basic economic terms and how economics affects their everyday life. Through the use of economic concepts and strategies students will be able to make rational choices and write about them.
Also, through the use of two novels The Bottle in the Kitchen and The Other Side of the Sun students will learn how to make decision trees and lists of pros and cons for the decisions that the characters made throughout the two books. Students will be able to verbalize how decisions can be made with the practice of role playing and making up their own skits.
Costs and Benefits of Life-Style Choices
Phyllis Sandoval
This curriculum utilizes the economics of decision-making regarding life’s daily choices, consequences and outcomes of these choices, and the effects they have on the teenager’s future as well as their future offspring. Good choices made daily will make deposits into life’s account, which bring success, or poor choices will make withdrawals, which subtract from or hinder the journey toward success. Risky behaviors and their consequences included are poor nutrition, premarital sex, substance abuse, STDs, and unhealthy relationships. Positive choices taught and encouraged include life-affirming goals, insight into positive relationships and their characteristics, healthy food choices, postponing sexual activity, completing schooling — all lifestyles in the student’s best interest.
Future offspring, their health and happiness is a focus of the unit hoping students will trade-off present gratification (premarital sex, pizza every day, etc.) for a chance to increase their risks of positive outcomes—healthy children, free of sickness and abnormalities. Incorporated into the curriculum are facts on STDs, substance abuse, nutrition and pregnancy, teen pregnancy and abortion, costs of pregnancy and healthy and unhealthy relationships. The goal is to show the teenager that making positive choices is in their best self-interest
Self Exploration and Decision
Making
William Shiver
This unit is designed for high school gifted students. Economics is concerned with making rational choices or decisions. The word rational as used here means in the self interest of the decision maker. The more a person knows about his or her self, the more their decisions can reflect their self interest. There is a natural link, therefore, between economics and self exploration. Using economics concepts and strategies as tools, students will explore several aspects of self knowledge including values, learning styles, multiple intelligences and temperament types. They will apply this knowledge and these tools to making decisions about high school course selection, particularly mentorships, and to career and post-secondary school searches. Companion readings (essays and short stories) are included throughout the unit as optional enrichment assignments.
Smart Money Decisions
Stanley P. Yukon
This curriculum unit focuses on teaching eighth grade special education students essential economic knowledge about money, budgets, saving, spending, and other consumer decision-making skills. The nine-week unit will utilize elements of math, literature, and social studies, but will be primarily guided by the New Mexico Scope and Sequence for the Math Curriculum.
A vital success component to this unit will be the gaining and retaining of sustained student interest and participation. To this end, a combination of teaching and learning strategies will be employed. A visit and lecture by a member of the Albuquerque Mayor’s Budget Office, related business experiences of the instructor, student budget writing, student role and game playing, reading pertinent literature, and viewing a classic movie should combine to spark student involvement while imparting valuable consumer-related information.
The Smart Money Decisions unit will have as its overarching goal the educating and
enlightening of eighth grade students in the vital area of consumer economics. Students
will be actively engaged in their learning. They will compose their own personal and
business budgets, read and report on Tom Sawyer’s decision-making, view and critique
the movie Casablanca, engage in question and answer sessions with government and
business officials, and engage in consumer role playing with each other.