Defining students’ socioscientific issues classroom decision-making components and practice proficiencies

Decision-making is often named as one of the primary goals in creating a science literate society, though rarely articulated as a specifically defined practice (or skill). Without a clearer conception of the practices of decision making, significant barriers exist for science instructional materials and research design. Building on literature in science education, psychology, concepts of structured decision making and qualitative clinical interviews (n = 36), we clarify the definition of high-quality classroom decision making and to describe levels of proficiency in student practices across multiple components of the decision-making process. Undergraduate students were led in interviews through a policy-level decision and asked to perform steps of a structured decision-making process. We observed decision-making components that included taking multiple perspectives of the socioscientific issue, incorporating multiple outcome-based criteria that drive the decision, describing specific scientific information needed to analyze the solution options based on desired criteria, evaluating both positives and negatives of all the options with evidence justifications, and using compensatory reasoning of tradeoffs during option selection. Qualitative comparisons of these interviews determined that the important features of higher proficiency decision-making across all components were maintaining an alignment between stakeholders, criteria, and analysis throughout the process, and included metacognitive discussion of the strategies used in decision-making. The discussion includes limitations of normative decision making models as well as additional practices that should be included in future descriptions of student decision making, and affordances of structured decision making to support development of students’ socioscientific reasoning. This work represents a useful first step for defining decision making for science education research, and for learning designs in science classrooms. © The Author(s) 2025.