Decision Milestones and Decision-Based Learning in a Canine Lab Exercise: How Students Decide

This paper introduces decision milestones, which are intermediate judgments students make during a lab paired with a written final justified decision, as a mechanism for making student reasoning visible in Decision-Based Learning. The lab was about evaluating evidence of cheating in voluntary submissions of dog agility run times and their video documentation. Comparing decision milestone selections with final decisions about cheating was used to partition students into concordance groups. Qualitative coding of written justifications revealed substantial variation within concordance groups in how students reached their conclusions. Cluster analysis identified six relatively clean reasoning patterns, four within the correct conclusion groups and two within the incorrect conclusion groups. The study (N = 78, three semesters, one undergraduate business analytics course taken after an initial statistics course) is descriptive; it does not measure learning outcomes or test whether the approach improves student performance. The patterns offer instructors a vocabulary for recognizing how students reason. It should be possible to add decision milestones to other DBL-based labs where a culminating judgment is reached through stages of analysis; the results suggest that the concordance patterns identified here can guide how instructors structure subsequent feedback and pedagogy.