A Study on the Relationship among Knowledge Acquisition Sources at the Teacher- and College-Level, Student Absorptive Capacity and Learning Outcomes: Using Student Prior Knowledge as a Moderator

Abstract

There are a multitude of factors influencing the learning outcomes of students, with all previous studies basing their conclusions upon predetermined variables according to different theories and exploring the relevance between them. In this study, two important antecedents—the transfer of teachers' knowledge and student orientation—are put forward based on the knowledge conversion theory and marketing concepts to explore the conspicuousness between various factors within the structural model. This study uses students from colleges in Taiwan as its research samples. Purposive sampling is adopted to acquire the samples required for statistics. A total of 801 participants are involved in this study. The results indicate that knowledge transfer at the teacher level plays a significant role in students' absorptive capacity and learning outcomes, that student orientation at college levels has a great influence on students' absorptive capacity, and that the prior knowledge of students has a positive moderating effect on the influence of teachers' knowledge transfer on students' absorptive capacities. Based on these results, the study provides suggestions for relevant theoretical and practical implications to indicate the contributions of this research.