A Novel Parabolic Model of Instructional Efficiency Grounded on Ideal Mental Workload and Performance

Instructional efficiency within education is a measurable concept and models have been proposed to assess it. The main assumption behind these models is that efficiency is the capacity to achieve established goals at the minimal expense of resources. This article challenges this assumption by contributing to the body of Knowledge with a novel model that is grounded on ideal mental workload and performance, namely the parabolic model of instructional efficiency. A comparative empirical investigation has been constructed to demonstrate the potential of this model for instructional design evaluation. Evidence demonstrated that this model achieved a good concurrent validity with the well-known likelihood model of instructional efficiency, treated as baseline, but a better discriminant validity for the evaluation of the training and learning phases. Additionally, the inferences produced by this novel model have led to a superior information gain when compared to the baseline.