The effects of planning on teachers’ behaviors have been examined in the past (e.g., Clark & Peterson, 1986). Clark and Peterson (1986) concluded that teachers saw planning as means to achieve confidence and reduce uncertainty. Although comparisons have been made regarding planning, research examining preservice teachers’ (PTs) attributions regarding their planning is limited. Studies investigating the relationship between PTs’ attributions and students’ performance (Ames, 1975; Beckman, 1970; Wiley & Eskilson, 1978) have found that PTs attributed students’ improvement to themselves and lack of improvement to the students or other external factors. The present study examined the effects of lesson planning on PTs’ attributions under two planning conditions: a) self-designed (SD) and b) pre-designed (PD) plans. SD lessons were constructed by PTs to achieve specified lesson objectives and PD lessons were obtained from a published curriculum. An alternating treatment design was used to examine 16 physical education PTs as they taught 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students volleyball and soccer units throughout one semester. A week before teaching, PTs were provided with lesson objectives and instructed to either design their own lesson (SD) or given a pre-designed lesson (PD). Prior to and following each lesson qualitative data were collected using pre-teaching and post-teaching written reflections and stimulated-recall video reflections. Data were analyzed for the purpose of uncovering PTs’ perceptions of lesson success and attributions associated with lesson success or failure. In addition to the multiple data sources, which served as a way to triangulate findings, results were shared with participants to confirm information. Similar to Beckman (1970), results revealed that PTs attributed successful lessons to their teaching abilities and unsuccessful lessons to other factors. In some cases, PTs saw the PD plans as the reason for unsuccessful lesson: “I was not given the opportunity to choose the activities that I wanted” and in other cases the students “… no matter what I did they kept trying to do their own thing”. Although PTs utilized a nationally validated SPARK curriculum as the source for activities in PD condition, results indicated that PTs tended to attribute unsuccessful lessons to external factors like PD plans or their students. However, when lessons were successful, PTs took credit regardless of which plan they implemented. A discussion of the importance of educational opportunities in which PTs are encouraged to develop responsibility for the successful and unsuccessful teaching outcomes as a strategy to improve teaching performance is provided. Keyword(s): college level issues