Model formulation ensures that we focus on the following model features: decisions, outcomes, structure, and data. As an example, one must decide how to go about studying for an online college class. We make decisions based on many factors -- work, family, housework, sleep, other classes, and even apathy. Do we schedule how much time we study for each class throughout the week? Complete the work for each class sequentially? Allot a certain amount of time each night for each class? Complete the work for the most difficult class first or last? These are some of the decisions we must make when scheduling our class work.
The outcomes of our decisions are the consequences of our decisions. For example, we decide to complete our classwork during the weekday evenings so that our weekends are free. This might give us time to spend with our families during the weekend, yet leave us unavailable to help our children with their own homework. We might decide to just work on our work when we can, which may lead to procrastination or completing a long assignment on the due date, possibly rushing the quality.
Structure refers to the logic & mathematics that link the elements of our model together. For example, the more homework your child has during the week, the less time you have available to spend on your own homework.
Finally, the data refers to the actual real observations. For example, we may find that week after week, if we don't make a schedule to complete our homework we spend our entire Sunday doing schoolwork. We may find that if we work on our schoolwork for 90 minutes every night that by Friday evening we are done for the week.
Decisions lead to outcomes based on the structure of our model. Data is input into the structure (mathematical formulas / logic) and hopefully lead to the results we're looking for.
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