Data Cleansing and Analysis as a Prelude to Model Based Decision Support

We describe a loosely integrated set of teaching modules that allow students to explore decision support systems (DSS) topics ranging from data warehousing to model based decision support. The modules are used as part of a spreadsheet based modeling approach to teaching DSS. We describe one particular module in detail in which students are forced to deal with a muddy data set as a prelude to analysis, modeling and decision support system development.