Roczniki Filozoficzne

Volume 29, Issue 4, 1981

Psychologia

Developping and Testing a Decision Aid for Pupils Choosing an Apprenticeship

This paper deals with application of decision analysis in pupils apprenticeship choosing. The main problem of this paper is to veryfy the hypothesis: does a decision aid in the form of helping pupils to construct a goal hierarchy, effect the information seeking and processing efficiency by pupils in their choosing apprenticeship situation. The author référés two experimental studies in this field: 1. the laboratory investigation and 2. the example of real lif^ situation analysis at employment office. The idea has been presenting here is a very new in psychological literature because it has been shown the way of transfering some laboratory results into practice. The tests of effects of the decision aid foccused on the information acquisition and processing behavior of pupils while choosing one from several apprenticeships. It was derived four criteria for evaluating the information processing: 1. the number of atribute used; 2. the proportion of alternatives considered per attribute used; 3. the tau-correlation between the order of attribute use, and the rank order of importance of the attributes, elicited before the choice task; 4. the proportion of so-called jumps in the search pattern. A discriminatory analysis showed that the decision aid had its largest effect on the goal orientedness of the search process (critérium 3), followed by critérium 2. The effect on critérium 4 wais also considerable, while the effect on the critérium 1 was only small. Comparing these results with other studies we can conclude that decision aid improves the choice behavior of mainschool pupils up to the performance level of unguided university students.