A psycholinguistic study : investigating individual learning efficiency (ILE) through the concepts of learning style, information processing path and energy transfer pathway

Abstract

This thesis aimed to use Individual Learning Efficiency to predict the language performance patterns of three groups of individuals respectively from schools of science, business and engineering. Individual Learning Efficiency (ILE) is defined as a ratio incorporating a mathematical concept known as Shannon entropy, which indicates the degree of randomness or disorder of a message source underlying optimized input-output digital designs. Predictions were made at verbal precision meaning that the actual entropies of target message sources (i.e., the degrees of randomness of learners and learning targets as the target message sources involved in the study) were not calculated in bits but were verbally estimated, so as to answer a research question set in the educational context: whether there is a higher chance of better learning performances when the entropies of the learner and the learning target are closer to each other. The application of the ratio ILE (defined as entropy of learner/entropy of learning target) in predicting language performance patterns involved the integration of three concepts, learning style, information processing path and energy transfer pathway, which are respectively from educational, psychological and physical levels of investigation. Integrating the three concepts required three steps: the first step was to identify learning-associated activities with respect to learning style, information processing path and energy transfer pathway through their own implicit time windows, which was a multidisciplinary consideration. The second step sought interdisciplinary understanding in which learning activities identified in relation to the three concepts were aligned with one another using a common time interval against a single linear time line so that any learner and learning target becomes readily countable for the estimation of the entropy of learning targets and learners relative to one another. The third step was a transdisciplinary attempt to bring the time frames of the concept of Shannon entropy and that of learning style (especially the sequential-global style dimension that is analogous to the long-standing field-independent-field-dependent dimension) -- which are mathematical and verbal concepts respectively -- closer together with the help of schematic diagrams composed of Venn diagrams and arrows in order to predict the results of the statistical study based on ILE at verbal precision without calculating in bits the actual entropies of the learners and the learning targets involved. Two simple statistical tests, correlation and t-test, were used to look at the language performance patterns against styles among students of business, engineering and science backgrounds who represent three distinct groups of individuals attributed to their differential degree of reliance on the two contrastive representation systems, mathematics and natural language, in learning. The close match between the verbally predicted results and the actual results suggests that ILE, a ratio which incorporates Shannon entropy, and which indicates a higher learning efficiency when the entropy of a learner is closer to the entropy of a learning target, is highly facilitative to predicting learning performances at verbal precision and that it is immediately open to computational validation as the future follow-up work to this thesis in the hope of achieving the ultimate goal of devising individualized instruction in education.