Students must make decisions about their lifestyle, future careers, academic pursuits, and classroom and school issues. Learning to make effective decisions for themselves and for society is an important aspect of competence. They can learn decision making through interacting and solving problems with others. A central ingredient for successful group decision making is constructive controversy. Students should express their opposing views openly, explore other opinions, understand different perspectives, and integrate ideas and information into high quality, accepted solutions. To make controversy constructive, they should realize that they have strongly positive-linked goals; convey acceptance of the other as a person; influence and be open to being influenced rather than dominate and control each other; and, view the problem as a challenge to solve rather than feel the stress of a crisis or the apathy of underestimation. These results emphasize the importance of having students practice their constructive controversy skills by participating in classroom and school decision making. (Author)