Decision-making requires knowing how to find relevant information and work on it. For this purpose, Anderson and Williams wrote the article titled “Turning Data into Better Decision Making: Asking Questions, Collecting and Analyzing Data in a Personal Analytics Project” (2019). In it, they provide insight into decision-making using their students as an example. The topic of the article is data collection and subsequent analysis. The authors describe the project they had created for the students that had been intended as a term paper. The authors’ purpose was to teach their students to gather data and apply it to their life.
The article’s conclusions covered the lessons that students and instructors learned from completing the project. First, “students experience the full investigation process when they design their project, collect their data, perform the analysis, and make conclusions”(Anderson & Williams, 2019, p.128). Second, instructors believed that the project should have been more applicable to real-life by working on assignments that firms require to do. Finally, both groups noted the influence of students’ findings on the same spheres of life about which they had written.
Altogether, the article is an interesting overview of lessons in data collection and analysis. It is worthy of attention because it showcases an efficient way of motivating students to acquire data analysis skills. The article is easy to read and understand since the authors describe each stage of the project in detail and explain their significance for students and business analytics. I found the survey section particularly illuminating as it discloses the positive correlation between students’ motivation and output. The better a person understands the relevance of the information to their life, the more invested they are in making decisions.
Reference
Anderson, J. S., & Williams, S. K. (2019). Turning data into better decision making: Asking questions, collecting and analyzing data in a personal analytics project. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 17(2), 126-145. Web.