The study investigated the interaction of personal and environmental factors influencing seventh graders' selection of career exploration courses for increased exploration in the eighth grade. A stratified random sample (496 students) was drawn from the Pittsburgh Public School's Occupational, Vocational, and Technical Exploratory Program. Personal and environmental factors included: (1) achievement subscores for industrial arts/home economics/business education; (2) factors of age, race, breadwinner's socioeconomic status, and home school; (3) vocational attitude maturity; (4) motivation; (5) occupational values of interest and satisfaction, salary, prestige, and security; (6) attitude scores for industrial arts/home economics/business education; and (7) student self-reports on teacher/program/peer influence on course choices. The dependent variables were 12 career exploration courses in rank order of popularity. Computations included Pearson product moment correlation, multiple regression analysis, and Behrens-Fisher t-tests. Some conclusions were that exploratory business education courses can successfully be implemented at the middle school and that it is possible to design learning activities which appeal to a wide range of student backgrounds. Sex, race, and occupational value-security were the most frequently appearing and stable influencing variables. Career exploration course selection by preadolescents is only moderately explainable by personal/environmental analysis. (Author/EA)