The Student’s Brain As Decoder with Increasing Bandwidth: the Simulation Modeling Results

Modern theory of learning uses v arious metaphors and analogies that explain the educational process features. The article is devoted to the analysis and further development of metaphors «man – communication channel» and «brain – message decoder» widely used in didactics and cognitive psychology. It discusses the possibility of semantic complexity assessing of the educational text or oral message and building its complexity profile. For this, the analyzed text is divided into elementary phrases expressing simple thoughts. The semantic complexity of phrase relative to certain thesaurus is considered to be equal to the number of words that need to be spoken to explain it to the student with the given thesaurus. Assessing the complexity of each phrase, you can create complex text profile – graph of dependence of the phrase presence probability in the text from its complexity. The concepts «transmission coefficient of the brain decoder», «volume and information understanding coefficients» are introduced. The mathematical modeling methods show how the learning result depends on the co mplexity profile of the educational material and the capacity of the student’s «decoder brain». With the growth of student’s knowledge an increase of the volume and information understanding coefficients occurs. The computer model simulating the learning process is built. It is taken into account that: 1) the teacher and the student form an information semantic system, and the training is reduced to the perception (listening or reading) of the increasing complexity texts sequence; 2) as the student learns more complex ideas (phrases), the message decoder capacity in creases because of the «near development zone»; 3) the greater the complexity of the acquired ideas (phrases), the higher the rate of forgetting. The simulation results show that the considered metaphor and the proposed models really allow to explain how the training takes place.

Interpersonal Communication: Biblical Insights on the Problem and the Solution

The communication problem is placed in biblical perspective by analyzing the effects of the fall of man on his communication with God and with his fellow man. The solution is placed in a similar perspective; viewing the process of sanctification as a developing relationship wherein God communicates with the Christian through the Word and the Christian communicates with God through prayer. Some of the man-to-man implications of this God-to-man communication pattern are germinally explored.