TITLE:
Quantifying the Learning Process of Professional English with an Importance Weighted Absorption Metric
AUTHORS:
Mo Shi, Baixiao Tang
KEYWORDS:
Professional English, Importance Weighted Absorption Metric, Dynamic Evaluation, Root-Based Teaching, Knowledge Absorption
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.17 No.6,
June
25,
2026
ABSTRACT: The current lack of dynamic evaluation methods significantly hinders professional English instruction in higher education. To quantify the learning process in root-based teaching, this study introduces a novel Importance Weighted Absorption Metric (IWAM). Utilizing a pre-post design with 80 undergraduate students, this study collected item-level importance ratings and mastery changes for singular words and multi-word phrases. The proposed IWAM integrates student-rated relevance of pre-class with post-class mastery variations to compute weighted absorption scores. By comparing IWAM with traditional frequency-based measures, the results in this study demonstrate that importance weighting provides a more sensitive evaluation of instructional impact. The analysis in this study effectively uncovers systematic acquisition differences between single words and multi-word phrases, enabling the construction of a reproducible student knowledge-absorption index. Furthermore, this study outlines an algorithmic pathway to convert survey-derived importance ratings into classroom-level evaluational metrics. The findings offer a data-driven, process-oriented evaluation framework that can be integrated into digital teaching platforms, which is expected to optimize pedagogical interventions and enhance classroom learning efficiency.