Wisdom in Student Assignments: Its Operationalisation and Manifestation

The paper examines the presence of knowledge-related wisdom in student assignments by apply-ing the constructs of wisdom developed by researchers at the Max Plank Institute for Human De-velopment in Berlin. They are factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, contextualisation, rela-tivism, and uncertainty. Reciprocal instructor wisdom was operationalised as intellectual excel-lence, inter-personal skills and experience. The manifestations of wisdom were observed in the completion of a case study requiring students to analyse IT benefit management practices. The findings of the study indicated satisfactory to good levels of factual and procedural knowledge, high levels of relativism but low levels of contextualisation and dealing with uncertainty. Even though previous research has shown the presence of wisdom at an early age, the findings of this student-oriented study should be pleasantly surprising to most academics