Rules for Rational Design Making: An Experiment with 15- and 16-year old Students

Multicriteria analysis constitutes a way to model decision processes, which allow the decision maker to assess the possible implications each course of action may entail. A multicriteria problem is chosen from the Programme for International Student Assessment 2003 Report, and then extended to include questions involving a choice of preferences and decisions. These questions are posed to 109 secondary school students aged 15 to 16, whose problem-solving and heuristic decision-making skills are then analyzed. We wanted to see whether the students understood the decision rules and applied them correctly and to promote the development of the student's ability to take a critical stance given the rules of choice that are applied in society. We discovered that students have difficulty using mathematics when assigning a weight to achieve an objective, i.e., they know how to apply rules to a data table, but they do not know how to manipulate the data to reach a specified goal, though they are able to recognize the functional use of the rules of choice used in society.