This study explored the effects of student selection versus teacher selection of instructional activities and the reasons given by teachers and students for their selections. Forty-two resource room students in grades 3 through 6 served as subjects. The progress of these students was monitored by means of a technically adequate, curriculum-based, repeated measurement data collection and evaluation system. The system was constructed to notify teachers when a change in instruction was needed for each student. One-third of the students selected their own instructional changes from an experimenter-generated set of activities. For the other two-thirds, the teachers selected activities from this same set. The dependent data were the number of structured and unstructured activities selected by teachers and students and the reasons cited for these selections. Teachers selected significantly more highly structured activities than students and cited more skill-related reasons for their selections. The discussion includes implications for practice and teacher training.
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