Empowering the assessment of 'wicked' competencies : A multi-level knowledge management architecture

In response to the growing demand for fostering ‘wicked’ competencies amongst graduates, embedding authentic assessment practices is becoming a prominent theme in contemporary higher education. Wicked competencies are ‘soft’ skills such as evaluative judgement skills, critical thinking and teamwork skills that are highly sought after but difficult to develop amongst graduates. In this context, the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) model is intrinsically appealing. However, its implementation in the development of wicked competencies demands integrating the teacher’s knowledge management component owing to the unique disposition in scaffolding these competencies in higher education. Therefore, this research proposes a TPC-MCK (management of content knowledge) framework by adding the knowledge management (KM) component as a building block to authentically instil and assess wicked competencies amongst graduates. To assist the KM component of the TPC-MCK model, this research proposes a multi-level KM architecture embedding topic maps and ontologies to enable the effective management of authentic assessment resources. The proposed architecture paves the way for teachers in the development of knowledge and skills around authentic assessment of wicked competencies through efficient access to relevant, context-specific, adaptable, and reusable authentic assessment resources.