CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

• Background to the Study

In any organization, members only become productive when the less experienced are mentored, instructed and guided by the experienced ones. Thus, the progress of organization requires competent and dedicated experienced hands who could impart the necessary knowledge, attitude and skills to others. This is not possible without knowledge, which is a basis for change process. Change brings about increase in work participation where fatigue could be reduced drastically. It offers an individual member of organization opportunity to reason and contribute greatly in all activities within the organization.

The progress of any organization cannot be possible without preserving, sharing and developing the organizational skills and knowledge. Skills and knowledge are the bases for change in any organization. It is, therefore, necessary for skills and knowledge to be shared for the sustenance of organizational values. This is attainable through group discussion, internal meetings, interaction with people within and outside the organization, seminars, workshops, conferences and community of practice. This calls for knowledge management, which entails identification, within the organization, who knows what is needed so that proper placement, training and use of knowledge could be made.

Knowledge management is all about knowledge identification, capture, application, sharing, storage, re-use and integration. Knowledge management is geared towards enhancing performance of members, competition, innovation, sharing of ideas, integration and sustainability in organizational performance. It is also aimed at improving

the quality of people‟s contributions to their organization and to make them responsible, cooperative, ready to share what they know and learn, effective in challenging, negotiating and learning from others. This provides avenues for critical issues to be examined for the survival and competence of the organization. Knowledge management is a process geared towards the achievement of organizational goals using the data and information processing capacity of information technologies, creative and innovative capacity of human beings. It can be seen as a mixture or combination of information technology and human innovation. This involves a range of strategies and practices used solely in an organization to identify, create, represent and distribute knowledge insights embodied in individuals or embedded in the organization as whole as a process or practice.

Knowledge management refers to the systematic management of process by which knowledge is identified, created, gathered, shared and applied (Benjamins, 2001). In addition, knowledge management is identified as comprising a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, present, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences that comprise knowledge which are embodied in individual or embedded in organizations as processes or practices. From the two definitions above, it could be concluded by the present study that the four elements of knowledge management that include: knowledge creation and capture; knowledge sharing and enrichment; information storage and retrieval; and knowledge dissemination as applied in business organizations could equally be applied in evaluation of students‟ performance. This may be possible since through innovations new ideas are created and acquired by students after which the captured ideas could be shared among themselves

through group discussions, tutorials or seminar presentations that could lead to adoption, application or presentation of such knowledge after graduation. It could equally improve on students‟ capability and ease assessment on the part of lecturers of Colleges of Education.

In essence, one of the most critical challenges to a knowledge society is to cultivate human capital with capacity to compete, innovate, create and share knowledge. This is one factor that motivated the current study, if these elements are applied to evaluation of students‟ performance, it could help in producing the caliber of students with above capacities who could be capable of competing with the outer world.

APPLICATION OF ELEMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TO EVALUATION OF STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE IN COLLEGES OF EDUCATION IN NORTH-WEST GEO-POLITICAL ZONE IN NIGERIA