The Arc's Self-Determination Scale: Procedural Guidelines

3. Goals should reflect something that the student wants to
improve on.
4. Goals should have specific, practical starting and finishing
dates.
5. Goals should be written.
6. Goals should be stated in terms of anticipated outcomes.
7. Students should be able to visually track their progress on
the goal.
The educational planning and decision-making process is an
enterprise that revolves around goal-setting, implementation and
evaluation. The involvement of students in this process, from
elementary school through graduation, provides the best
educational environment to promote effective goal setting and
attainment skills. Teachers and parents can model effective skills
like identifying short and long-term goals, describing objectives,
implementing plans based on these goals and objectives and
reevaluating and refining these plans.
Self-Observation, Self-Evaluation and Self-Reinforcement Skills
The definitional framework of self-determined behavior identified
such action as self-regulated, and self-regulated behavior as
constituting, at the very least, the essential skills of selfobservation,
self-evaluation and self-reinforcement. Whitman
(1990) defined self-regulation as "a complex response system that
enables individuals to examine their environments and their
repertoires of responses for coping with those environments to
make decisions about how to act, to act, to evaluate the desirability
of the outcomes of the action, and to revise their plans as
necessary." It is within this broader context that self-regulation
skills are important for self-determined behaviors. Whitman goes
on to maintain that, in order to show dynamic self-regulation,
individuals must make decisions concerning what skills to use in
which situation, examine the task at hand and their strategic
repertoire, and formulate, enact and evaluate a plan of action, with
revisions if necessary. Self-regulation differs from automatic
processing in that it requires focused attention and continuous
decision-making among alternative responses (Whitman, 1990).
Self-regulation includes the skills of self-monitoring (observation
of one's social and physical environment), self-evaluation (making
judgments about the acceptability of this behavior through
comparing information about what one is doing with what one
ought to be doing) and, based upon the outcome of this selfevaluation,
self-reinforcement.
Internal Locus of Control
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