Reconsidering the value of pupil attitudes to studying post-16: a caution for Paul Croll

Gorard and Rees 2002, or Selwyn et al. 2006, for example). And using them would
almost certainly have led to intentions being dropped from the model, once
background and prior attainment were accounted for - because the expressed
intentions are partly a product of these same determinants, and because the 4% would
then be dwarfed by the scale of ‘effect’ sizes revealed in Croll’s Table 4 (p.410).

Stability of intentions?

Turning to a second aspect of the claim about the value of early expressed intentions,
how volatile were they? Croll shows (in his Table 3, p.407) that, at some stage
between year 7 and year 11, 92.5% of pupils expressed an intention to stay on. With
around 72% of pupils staying on, this means that around 67% of stayers (.72 times
.93) will have expressed an ‘intention’ to do so even if such intentions were
completely meaningless. Only 40.8% of pupils expressed the same intention when
asked repeatedly from year 7 to year 11. I reproduce here as my Table 3 the relevant
section of Table 3 from Croll (2010, p.407). It is clear that the majority of pupils
changed their mind over the six years from Year 7 onwards. Expressed intentions are
described by Croll as accurate predictors of behaviour, but if a pupil selects both of
two outcomes on different occasions then they must be right at least once! Whatever it
is that reported intentions are expressing it is very volatile, and this surely suggests a
lack of substantive correlation between declared intention and behaviour.

Table 3 - Percentage of pupils consistent in their declared intentions - Year 7 to Year

11

Only 666 of the young people were interviewed on at least four of the five occasions
that they could have been between Years 7 and 11 (p.407). Unfortunately, Croll does
not tell us how many had four and how many had five interviews. The methods
section (p.405) suggests that most of these 666 had only four interviews, but it would
have taken little space to clarify for the reader. So using four interviews as the basis

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