Explicit and Tacit Assessments

Educators use various forms of assessment to evaluate a student's performance in a class.  These assessments are intended to determine the level of mastery a students has achieved in the given subject matter.  However, a student learns at several different levels and these levels of understanding or learning are defined by Bloom.

Many educators agree that assessment must not target only one level of learning but must consider multiple levels.  Common testing methods of assessment where students answer questions to evaluate their memorization and comprehension of material simply evaluates lower level learning.  Mitri noted this level of objective evaluation is easy to automate but only evaluates the students explicit knowledge of the subject matter.  The author argued higher levels of learning can only be evaluated through evaluation of tacit knowledge.

The challenge is to develop assessments to properly evaluate higher levels of learning.  A student's expression of application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of the material requires the student to formulate explicit knowledge from the tacit knowledge developed as a result of the course.  Additionally, the grading of these assessments requires the faculty member to apply tacit knowledge in evaluating the student's responses.  Faculty members must be able to apply their tacit knowledge of evaluation of the assessments to their evaluations.

While Mitri was not attempting to describe grading rubrics, in essence, this argument provides the knowledge management perspective on the real purpose of grading rubrics.  The grading rubric represents the professor's conversion of the tacit assessment criteria into an explicit form.  This is true knowledge management at work!