This single-class activity augments the popular desert island activity to include a secret insider who aims to influence their group covertly. The motivation for this augmented activity is twofold: (1) to highlight and dispel notions of invulnerability to groupthink and (2) to provide an opportunity to engage in small-group decision making. To…

Three staples of management and organizational behavior classes are units on creativity, problem solving, and group decision making. This article presents an experiential exercise in creative problem solving in which the participants attempt to create a cartoon caption both individually and in small groups. The cartoons all come from "The New…

Designing learning experiences that mimic real-life contexts has always been a challenge for leadership educators. As a result, many educators in leadership courses rely on studies of leadership perspectives, self-assessment activities, and textbook case analysis. However, many educators also successfully design microlevel processes and…

This article explores the arts-integrated approach to teaching and learning by combining the art of quilt making, technology, and research. The author challenged his students to use technology and the knowledge of their surrounding county to create a quilt that reflects a sense of community and engagement. The goal was to encourage a more engaged…

Issues surrounding the contextual environment in which strategic decisions are made are difficult concepts to grasp, particularly for undergraduate students with little business experience. They are also problematic for graduate students that have not been called on to make such decisions within their career. The authors propose an exercise that…

The Lithuanian Informatics Olympiad is a problem solving contest for high school students. The work of each contestant is evaluated in terms of several criteria, where each criterion is measured according to its own scale (but the same scale for each contestant). Several jury members are involved in the evaluation. This paper analyses the problem…

Using planned, sequenced "group initiative tasks," effective cooperative skills can be taught and practiced in an atmosphere of fun and challenge. Such tasks are presented to a group for problem solving, using the physical and intellectual resources of the entire group. (JMM)

Describes a group project that involves geometry and falls into an area of mathematics known as operations research, which is crucial to making decisions in business and industry. Includes problem statements and project assessment guidelines and illustrates solutions. (KHR)

Orienteering is an outdoor pursuit in which participants try to locate a series of different control points, using only a map and compass (Laubach, 1998). It is a life-long skill that can be taught to all ages in both a natural and urban setting. Adventure education is an approach to teaching where an individual is placed in an unfamiliar…

This study examines the viability of time limit as an independent variable for investigating the decision-making process. Three major aspects of time and decision making are investigated: (1) time and accuracy of group decision, (2) time and member satisfaction with the group decision, and (3) time and perceived accuracy of group decision. A pilot…

Guided design, an educational strategy based on the conviction that students are educated better by working through an ascending order of well-designed problems than by passively accumulating knowledge, employs small groups of students attacking open-ended problems. This paper describes guided design--its operation and advantages in the…

The Blake Interaction Model presented in this manual is designed to eliminate three problems which usually confront a task force charged with the responsibility of program development in a conference setting: (1) how to involve simultaneously several work groups in the productive capacity developing solutions for several separate problems; (2) how…

Analysis of protocols from think-aloud paired problem-solving sessions of 2 year-11 students found that, although the students were generally successful in coordinating their different, yet complementary, problem-solving roles, their metacognitive decision making was sometimes adversely affected by the social interaction between them. (17…

Three group processes--regular face-to-face interacting groups, the nominal group technique (NGT), and Delphi procedures--were compared in terms of their ability to facilitate the quantitative and qualitative productivity of a decision making group. The results unequivocally supported the superiority of the Delphi procedures. Findings also tended…

The three-week elementary school program in Houston, Texas, offered seminars, student selected interest activities, and group activities in which children planned and constructed a part of a future world and were thus exposed to problem solving, decision making, and research activities. (DLS)