Going Beyond the Code: A Guide to Teaching Decision Trees to Affect Students’ Ethical Choice-Making Behavior
Teach grad students to build ethical decision trees by blending literature, pilot data, and war stories.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Evanko et al. (2025) wrote a how-to paper for professors.
They show one way to teach behavior-analysis graduate students to build ethical decision trees.
The method mixes three parts: reading the literature, running tiny pilot studies, and sharing real instructor stories.
What they found
The paper is a tutorial, not an experiment.
It gives step-by-step tips, sample trees, and class activities you can copy.
Students end up with a reusable tool for tough ethical calls in practice.
How this fits with other research
Khemka et al. (2016) went further and proved decision-tree teaching works.
They used a classroom curriculum called PEER-DM and raised adolescents’ scores on resisting peer pressure.
Evanko’s guide extends that idea upward: teach the teacher first, then the teacher can build trees for any age group.
Sherman et al. (2021) showed Behavioral Skills Training (BST) quickly brings teachers to near-perfect fidelity.
You can fold Evanko’s decision-tree lesson into the same BST format—model, rehearse, give feedback—to speed up learning.
Branch (2019) urges us to add pilot data when we teach; Evanko makes that step explicit, so the two papers line up neatly.
Why it matters
You can lift the three-part framework Monday.
Start class with one recent article, add a five-minute pilot you already ran, then tell the story of the last time you used the tree on the job.
Students leave with a living tool instead of a memorized code.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The design and practice of ethics in a profession can shape how it develops over time, setting the field apart from others. Professional training in ethics, however, is challenging. Application within the classroom is nearly entirely hypothetical, in comparison to more direct and precision-driven concepts and skills in the field such as data collection, schedules of reinforcement, assessment, and treatment procedures. This tutorial provides considerations for teaching the creation and use of decision trees in three parts (1) recommendations based on an interdisciplinary review of literature, (2) recommendations based on the results of a pilot study conducted by the authors, and (3) recommendations based on the authors’ pedagogical experiences in behavior analytic graduate course sequences.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s40617-024-01008-x