Going Beyond the Code: A Guide to Teaching Decision Trees to Affect Students’ Ethical Choice-Making Behavior

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.