The Relationship Among Tacit Knowledge, IQ And Academic Performance

Tacit knowledge exists in personal head, it is related to context and hard to explicate and articulate. Tacit knowledge typically is acquired with little or no environmental support. It is acquired by experience, practice and apperception. Tacit knowledge is related to personal experience, and it is important to individual's value goal, so it has practical value. Based on the deep understanding and comprehensive analysis of relative theory and exploring research in this field, we conducted two connected studies in the research aimed to explore the tacit knowledge's construction, function and its' role in middle school and college students' studying. The middle school and college students in Jinan participated in this research.StudyⅠTo validate the rationality of the construction of tacit knowledge, based on the test Of Scale of Tacit Knowledge in college students, and to explore tacit knowledge's construct of Chinese middle school students and college students. Then to revise Tacit Knowledge Inventory, in order to make the inventory become appropriate for Chinese middle school students and college students, and explore the general characteristics of tacit knowledge in Chinese middle school students and college students.StudyⅡTo explore the relationship of middle school and college students'academic performance with their tacit knowledge and IQ, and provide the suggestion of the role of tacit knowledge in academic based on the test of students' tacit knowledge. The findings were following based on the above two studies:1. The construction of Chinese students' tacit knowledge is six first-order factors and three second-order factors. The three second-order factors are: managing self, managing others, managing tasks, the six first-order factors are: self development, self regulation, cooperation, organization, subsidiary tools and managing performance. The construction of students' tacit knowledge is the same among different family seat, different grade and different gender.2. The reversed scale of middle school and college students' tacit knowledge has good validity and reliability. Confirmatory factor analysis testified the structural validity. And the coefficient indexes of construction validity are:χ2=2553.2, df=1071,χ2/df=2.38, GFI=0.937, AGFI=0.891, NFI=0.920, TLI=0.913, CFI=0.941, RMSEA=0.059. The six subscales'Cronbach's a and split-half coefficients are above 0.70.3. There is significant difference of middle school students'tacit knowledge and college students'tacit knowledge. As to the total score, the college students get higher score than those middle school students.4. There is not significant difference of students'tacit knowledge in gender and major.5. The correlation between tacit knowledge and IQ wasn't significant.6. Furthermore, we discovered that students who were high in tacit knowledge achieved higher academic grades than students who were low in tacit knowledge. Implications are drawn regarding the importance of tacit knowledge to students'success.7. IQ and tacit knowledge both can predict academic performance. But the predictor of IQ is declining while the predictor of tacit knowledge is increasing with the increasing of academic degree.8. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that tacit knowledge was a more powerful predictor of academic performance than IQ.