Category: Dispositions

The cornerstone of the Threshold Achievement Test for Information Literacy are the outcomes and performance indicators we wrote that were inspired by the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

Working with members of our Advisory Board, we first defined the information literacy skills, knowledge, dispositions, and misconceptions that students commonly demonstrate at key points in their education: entering college, completing their lower division or general education requirements, and preparing for graduation. These definitions laid the groundwork for analyzing the knowledge practices and dispositions in the Framework in order to define the core components that would become the focus of the test. Once we determined to combine frames into four test modules, the performance indicators were then used to guide item writing for each of the four modules. Further investigation of the Framework dispositions through a structural analysis led to identifying and defining information literacy dispositions for each module.

...continue reading "From Framework to Outcomes to Performance Indicators, Plus Dispositions!"

We're gearing up for big things this summer.  By the end of July we expect to have performance standards set for the first two modules.  We'll use the results of the field tests to establish criteria (i.e. cut scores) for how well we expect students to do on the test when they are entering college, when they've completed the bulk of their GE, and when they're ready to graduate with a bachelor's degree.  This is a major step forward for making the test ready to be used for course-level, program-level, and institutional assessment.

Over the past few months, we've also been thinking more about the role of dispositions in students' IL outcomes.  We know from the research on learning mindsets by Andrea Dweck and her colleagues that it’s vitally important for educators to instill in students the belief that they can develop their aptitudes through consistent effort.  Students who believe that their intelligence or skills are already fixed and cannot improve over time are more likely to struggle in their courses and may not persist to achieve their academic goals.
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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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