Within physical education (PE) scholarship decision-making seem to be a recurring theme. Some examples are "PE engagement" literature (e.g. Enright & O'Sullivan, 2010; Howley & Tannehill, 2014), where decision-making is surrounded by terms such as agency, student voice and choice, and empowerment. "Game sense" literature (e.g. Harvey & Jarrett, 2014; Light, Harvey, & Mouchet, 2014), where decision-making is concerned with strategy, tactics and thinking. Or literature discussing and conceptualizing teaching styles (e.g. Jaakkola & Watt, 2011; Mosston & Ashworth, 2002), where decision-making is a variable that teachers can adjust up or down to provide different  experiences for students. While decision-making thereby seem central within different "themes" of PE scholarship, it nevertheless seem that relatively little attention has been directed towards how decision-making and learning are related to one another in PE in practice.  In the paper we argue that we need more knowledge about how students make decisions or why their decisions might lead to learning in PE lessons. The broad purpose of this paper is to address this by considering the relationship between decision-making and learning in more detail. Specifically, we propose a methodology that provides a theoretical framing along with procedures enabling the investigating of this relationship between decision-making and learning.

The methodology we propose in the paper is based on the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, and mainly from some of his ideas about how individual organisms learn within social and cultural context (Dewey, 1910/1997, 1916/1980, 1938). The reason for limiting our discussion of Deweyan ideas to those regarding learning as an individual process, rather than the wider social and cultural aspects of the learning process for which Dewey might be most famous, has to do with the purpose of the paper. The purpose being to utilize Deweyan ideas and concepts to conceptualize the relationship between decision-making and individual learning and to propose procedural consequences of this framing. Consequences that in turn can provide guiding principles for the selection of procedures and methods that potentially can be useful for researchers wanting to produce empirical material about individual students decision-making within their individual learning processes.

The paper aims to provide a theoretical framing of the relationship between decision-making and individual learning, along with discussions about the implications of this framing for research and researchers wanting to investigate decision-making and learning from the student perspective. The paper furthermore include the proposal of specific research methods in order to do such research. By also providing an example from an ongoing investigation, the paper in addition tries to illustrate the types of data that can be generated through this methodology.

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