ABSTRACT
Classroom decisions of teachers or learners can be characterised in terms of concepts which economists use to explain consumption or investment behaviour. Ultimately, analysis has to focus on the interactive reality of their decision-making. Explanation is attempted in terms of a microeconomic model to see whether the resulting account improves in any way on rival accounts and is suggestive of new research emphases, likely targets and ways of testing the implications of the theory for consistency with observed behaviour. The methods of investigation may draw on various research traditions as long as they help to inform the imagination of the investigator. To investigate choice sets is to investigate the properties of choosers as well as the properties of the choice environment. Perhaps the most critical distinguishing feature of this kind of model is that it does not share the fundamental determinism of the conventional choice models of neoclassical economics and of statistical decision theory.
