This task force report considers strategies designed to elicit active participation on the part of severely multihandicapped students. The first section considers ways to gather information on environments and daily activities of severely multihandicapped students. Hypothetical daily home and vocational routines were composed and estimates made of daily time spent on the tasks. The next section examines skills required of severely multihandicapped students and the degree to which he/she can perform them. Ecological inventories are described which allow for prioritization of instructional targets and the use of partial response descriptors. The final section addresses ways to arrange instruction to ensure active participation through contextual rather than isolated instruction, small group rather than one-to-one instruction, conditional rather than unconditional assistance, heterogeneous versus homogeneous groupings, and predictable rather than unpredictable features of the schedule and structural arrangement. Appended are a parent participation guide, and an "ecological inventory" based on observations of children's behavior when playing with a remote control car. (CL)