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This brief paper reviews the literature and provides guidelines on how instructional practices to promote self-determination can be used to help students with learning disabilities make effective choices and decisions. Self-determination is linked to making good choices through five steps: know yourself; value yourself; plan; act; and experience outcomes and learn. Specific barriers faced by students with learning disabilities in learning to make effective choices and decisions include not acknowledging the disability; lack of self-understanding; learned helplessness and self-deprecating attributions; inappropriate or ineffective socialization skills; and difficulty in executive functioning skills. Discussion of curriculum suggests infusing instruction in making effective choices and decisions into school counseling programs, regular and special academic classes, career preparation classes, and extra-curricular activities. Nine factors that support self-determination instruction are listed such as partnerships among students, parents, and professionals in decision-making; opportunities for making choices; encouragement in taking appropriate risks; supportive relationships; accommodations and supports for unique student learning needs; and predictable consequences for actions. Other suggestions include teaching students to use a mnemonic device to remember choice and decision-making steps and using specific instructional programs to teach component skills of choice and decision making through self-determination. (Contains 10 references.) (DB)

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert