I have been serving as the Rhetoric Consultant on the TATIL test since 2014, where one of my main responsibilities was to analyze the Framework in order to prepare the board to write outcomes and performance indicators. In this post, I will be giving a brief overview as to how I went about that process of understanding the Dispositions.
In order to be able to test for the Dispositions, or what the Framework calls the “affective, attitudinal, or valuing dimension of learning,” we needed to determine what kinds of latent traits sat beneath the surface-level descriptions of these Dispositions within the Framework. Studying the Framework, I was initially confused about the distinction between Dispositions and Knowledge Practices because many dispositions appeared to be bound-up with an understanding of core information literacy concepts. For example, in Information Has Value, the Framework says that competent students will “value the skills, time, and effort needed to produce knowledge.” The problem is that in order to value the time and effort required to create knowledge, students must first have learned what is involved in creating these kinds of texts; so, unless students are explicitly taught the multiple stages of forming research questions, collecting data, analyzing, and then synthesizing the information into a cohesive text, how can they have developed an attitude that values the rigor of this process? Thus, an important question emerged: How do we isolate the affective trait from the knowledge implied in the Dispositions?
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