“I wisely started with a map.”
—J. R. R. Tolkien, on creating The Lord of the Rings
At the beginning of J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic The Lord of the Rings, the four hobbits Merry, Pippin, Frodo, and Sam stumble through one misadventure after another. They get lost repeatedly, are nearly captured by a malevolent tree, accidentally put several villains on their trail, and blurt out highly important secrets in front of folks who definitely shouldn’t be hearing them.
But by the end of the three-volume epic, the four hobbits can find their way through any wilderness, take care of themselves in combat, put down a dictatorial regime in their own home country with minimal bloodshed, . . . and, of course, save the world.
What happened? They learned some things, of course. But they also learned from the right people who taught them the right way—not just what things to do but when and how to do them.
That’s the idea that animates decision-based learning (DBL), a method pioneered at BYU that has an increasingly deep body of research documenting its benefits. McKay School professor Heather Leary, who has participated in several studies of DBL, says the method is exciting because it doesn’t demand new curriculum or different classroom management. Instead, it’s a change in approach to what teachers are already doing—one that is yielding exciting results.
DBL takes what an expert knows and how an expert uses what she knows and breaks it down to help a novice think through the possibilities, says Leary, an associate professor in the BYU Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology. “It starts out with a question, and then it gives you options. And you have to decide which direction to go to get where you’re trying to get to,” she says. “I think it’s exciting that little changes like this in instruction—it doesn’t have to be a huge overhaul—actually make big differences.”
The bedrock idea of DBL is the importance of knowing why a piece of information is useful, when to act on it, and how to use it best. That skill is called conditional knowledge: it folds declarative knowledge (facts, or knowing what) and procedural knowledge (processes, or knowing how) into the wisdom that comes with expertise.
The method was developed by Ken Plummer of BYU’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) along with colleagues at CTL and others from several of BYU’s education and physical and mathematical sciences departments. Plummer teaches DBL workshops at conferences and universities across the world and continues to study the impact of DBL in classrooms.
Even before she’d officially started her job at the McKay School, Plummer introduced Leary to DBL research at an instructional design conference she attended while concluding work as a curriculum designer at BYU–Idaho.
“I introduced myself to Ken because what they were talking about was fascinating stuff, and I told him I was going to be here at BYU,” Leary says. “When I came, he started talking to me about doing some qualitative research related to DBL, because I typically do qualitative research instead of quantitative work, and Ken is a ‘quant’ guy.”
In the first BYU-focused study that Leary joined, she, Plummer, and their coauthors examined several units of a course taken by third-year engineering students and taught by two experienced faculty members—an education professor and a mathematics professor—who had created decision models for their courses. That 2022 study looked at whether decision-based learning enhances students’ critical thinking skills.
The second DBL-focused study that Leary coauthored in 2023 was a bit more esoteric. Leary, Plummer, and a group of BYU-based coauthors examined the use of DBL-rooted activities to help nursing students master the fundamentals of acid-base analysis of arterial blood—a perfect illustration of DBL’s ability to transmit not just expert knowledge but expert-level thinking.
DBL is related to and complementary with a better-known teaching method called problem-based learning (PBL), Leary and her coauthors wrote in the 2022 study, but DBL’s decision model provides scaffolding that helps “students systematically break down the elements of a problem in order to take a reasoned-out course of action. Even the most guided PBL activities rarely have this level nor type of scaffolding. . . . Metaphorically, PBL is essentially DBL without the training wheels.”1
The authors note, however, that the two methods work well together and that DBL work can be most effective in classrooms when followed by PBL activities. Both studies showed that integrating decision-based learning into a curriculum pays promising dividends in student skill building and deeper learning.
“The two faculty felt their students were asking deeper and more thoughtful questions about the content when using DBL,” the authors of the 2022 study wrote. “They also observed the students using words aligned to the elements of critical thinking while answering questions and explaining their thinking to others.”2
After beginning with conditional knowledge to build students’ confidence and allowing them to explore the DBL model, the instructors in the 2022 study reported they were surprised to find as they moved through the course that students were ready for more complex activities—not just ready to learn but ready to work through complex ideas and decisions on their own.
“I throw out a question, and they’re like, ‘I know where to run,’” one instructor reported in the study. “And every time they go, ‘I know where to run,’ you can see them kind of go, ‘learning is fun! I’m competent. I’m confident. I can do this. I know what to do and how to work through this problem.’”3
In the 2023 study of DBL to help nursing students learn acid-base analysis of arterial blood, the instructor was motivated to integrate DBL models into her curriculum because she had struggled to understand the topic as a student and noticed that many of her students had the same problem. “Her goals . . . were to support students in developing clinical judgment and increased self-efficacy regarding this challenging unit,”4 the authors wrote.
The nursing instructor not only felt that those goals were met but also thought that DBL’s usefulness could be multifaceted. The authors wrote, “DBL may also be useful for teaching students a method for working through other complex topics by systematically breaking them into manageable sections.”5
That’s the beauty of research-supported methods such as DBL, Leary says: their benefits extend far beyond teaching students one particular skill in one particular class.
“They gain self-directed skills, they gain problem-solving skills, they gain critical-thinking skills, and they gain of all of these affective skills, plus communication and working with others,” she says. “We talk about these things as soft skills, but oftentimes people are hired because of those skills, not because of their content knowledge. You can teach people content and get them up to speed, but it’s really hard to teach someone those other skills on the job—but you can do it as a teacher.”
For Leary, continuing to do research into the benefits of DBL not only helps her and the students who conduct research with her but also gives her a strong sense of teaching “in the Savior’s way.”
“Christ walked along with people one-on-one, talking with them, helping them grow, and helping them realize for themselves the things that they needed to work on or the things that they needed to take responsibility for or be accountable for,” Leary says. “And it was all about growth and learning; not about ‘Just do this.’ We talk about this in the McKay School all the time, that Christ is the Master Teacher.
“And for me, it goes back to that, which is where do we also see that striving for growth and learning in ourselves as teachers, as parents, and as we help a teacher who we’re working with get ready to be a teacher or anything like that. It’s more about getting someone to be able to think for themselves and ask the right kinds of questions so they can learn and grow. It can be painful; it can be really messy and difficult. But in the long run, I think it is a better way for growth.”
By Stacey Kratz
Notes
1. Kenneth J. Plummer, Mansureh Kebritchi, Heather M. Leary, and Denise M. Halverson, “Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills through Decision-Based Learning,” Innovative Higher Education 47, no. 4 (August 2022): 715.
2. Plummer and others, “Enhancing,” 727.
3. Plummer and others, “Enhancing,” 727–28.
4. Sheri Tesseyman, Tracy Poulsen, Samantha Rainsdon-Meek, Heather Leary, Ursula Sorensen, and Kenneth Plummer, “Decision-Based Learning for Teaching Arterial Blood Gas Analysis,” International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship 20, no. 1 (21 July 2023): 6.
5. Tesseyman and others, “Arterial Blood Gas Analysis,” 8.