Young people are our future

Young people shape our future with their decisions. Unfortunately, young people are not usually taught the necessary decision-making skills in school. Instead of hoping students will make good decisions, we want to teach them how.

KLUGentscheiden!

That’s why I founded the initiative KLUGentscheiden! (www.klugentscheiden.org) at the University of Bayreuth, which I supervise from Innsbruck. We teach decision-making skills to young people based on workshops developed using current scientific methods. The young people apply the methods directly to an upcoming educational decision, such as “Which educational path do I take after school?”.

To be able to offer more of these workshops, we have trained numerous teachers – mainly at secondary schools and grammar schools in one-day regional teacher training courses – as multipliers. In addition, lighthouse schools are currently being set up in which KLUGentscheiden! will be linked with other initiatives and offerings in the best possible way.

International networking and commitment

The Alliance for Decision Education is a non-profit organization in the United States that aims to improve young people’s lives by providing them with the basic skills and dispositions to make better decisions with the help of leading scientists. Since 2020, I have had the great honor of actively shaping ADE’s strategic direction on the Alliance for Decision Education’s Advisory Council with influential researchers such as Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler and personalities such as chess world leader Garry Kasparov.

Scientific evaluation of the effect of decision-making skills training

Studies with over 1,000 managers and students show that the cognitive abilities of proactive decision-making can be sustainably improved through decision-making skills training. Further studies with over 1,300 participants show that proactive decision-making explains a significant proportion of the variance of self-efficacy and life satisfaction. This suggests that participation in decision-making skills training indirectly improves life satisfaction (press release of the University of Bayreuth, article in the Austrian Standard).

Recent studies also prove the effectiveness of decision-making skills training for adolescents. In addition to improving decision-making skills, (career-related) self-efficacy also increases (press release of the University of Bayreuth. This is precisely what motivates me and my team!