What Would You Decide on? Decision Tasks in Economic Classes at Business Schools – A Didactical Analysis with Regard to Self-Directed Learning (in German)

Abstract

Presently, self-directed learning is an important demand in the educational and didactical discourse. Implementing tasks in class is a way to involve students actively. This article discusses the question to what extent two selected exemplary tasks used in economic classes enable learners to self-direct their solution-finding-process. The special nature of both tasks only allows solutions in the form of economic decisions, which means that the solution-finding-process is a decision-making-process. This investigation discusses what a complete and ideal decision-making-process proves to be. This knowledge will then provide a basis for evaluating the tasks in terms of to what extent the learners perform this decision-making-process while they are working on it. Finally, the so called "decision tasks" are analyzed on the criteria of complexity and openness to make a statement about the impact of internal and external control. In the framework of this text analysis, we arrive at the conclusion that the tasks taken into consideration allow self-directed processing only in small parts, but an opening seems to be possible while they are being used in class.