Grade 6 Students’ Perception and Use of Data-Based Decision Trees

Decision-making processes are often based on data and data-driven machine learning methods in different areas such as recommender systems, medicine, criminalistics, etc. Well-informed citizens need at least a minimal understanding and critical reflection of corresponding data-driven machine learning methods. Decision trees are a method that can foster a preformal understanding of machine learning. We developed an exploratory teaching unit introducing decision trees in grade 6 along the question “How can Artificial Intelligence help us decide whether food is rather recommendable or not?” Students’ performances in an assessment task and self-assessment show that young learners can use a decision tree to classify new items and that they found the corresponding teaching unit informative.