Abstract

Recently there has been much interest in the research of tacit knowledge. For the field of education, tacit knowledge has implications for training students. For industrial area, tacit knowledge(TK) has a lot of implications for selection, performance, and training as well as organizational development. Although the categories of TK have been presented in many forms, there has never been an attempt of extracting TK factors from the empirical data. That is partially because TK inventories are usually tests constructed of multiple testlets. If a test is constructed of testlets, one must take into account the within-testlet effect before doing statistical operations using the data. We propose a two-step approach for factor-analyzing the data of a test constructed from multiple testlets. We demonstrate 5 TK factors and 1 scenario factor by the application of the approach to high school boys' data.