Making good decisions: Having confidence in simulations in higher education

• Finding effective design, use, and outcome measurements of simulation games.
• Normative and descriptive design perspectives can affect educational pedagogy.
• Understanding of human decision-making improves simulation learning outcomes.
• Effectiveness of simulation games as pedagogy depends on the design objectives.
• Practitioner and empirical support critical for acceptance of simulation learning.

To achieve the desired learning outcomes it is critical that developers and users of simulations understand human decision-making. How participants will make decisions in the simulation is a function of both the participant's expertise and their interaction with the exercise design. It is an important pedagogical issue to know whether the design of the simulation reinforces and builds a participant's ability to respond in a normative reasoned fashion to a decision situation, or to experience the situation in its complexity and respond in a synthetic intuitive fashion. To comprehend the implications of these two viewpoints I present the debate between promoters of the normative views and the descriptive views on decision-making. By performing a critical analysis of these different perspectives, I offer insight on how the decision-making philosophy used in the design of simulations affects both the use of the simulation and the measurable learning outcomes.