Repeated Judgements of Interest in Vocational Education: A Lens Model Analysis. Occasional Paper Number 6.

The topic of repeated judgments of interest in vocational education was examined in a study in which 10 female full-time technical and further education (TAFE) students (aged 15-60 years) were handed 120 randomly selected real profiles of TAFE students who had completed subject interest surveys in a previous study. The 10 TAFE students judged how interested they would be in studying subjects described by the profile writers. After the students had made a total of 120 judgments, they were retested. The students' responses were analyzed in terms of a lens model in which judgment is considered a function of task properties, cognitive control, and knowledge. The question of whether cognitive feedforward alters students' perceptions was examined by considering students' responses to seven cues: quality of teaching, importance of the subject, ability, difficulty of the subject, whether the course was liked, study time, and homework time. No significant differences in the levels of lens model indices from pre- to post-information judgments were found. It was concluded that students overcompensated in their efforts to maximize judgment accuracy and that they were unable to make full use of the entire range of cues. (13 references) (MN)