A Trapezoidal Fuzzy Method for Assessing Students’ Mathematical Modeling Skills

Michael Gr. Voskoglou^1,

¹School of Technological Applications, Graduate Technological Educational Institute (T. E. I.) of Western Greece, Patras, Greece

Cite this paper:
Michael Gr. Voskoglou. A Trapezoidal Fuzzy Method for Assessing Students’ Mathematical Modeling Skills. American Journal of Educational Research. 2014; 2(12):1144-1150. doi: 10.12691/education-2-12-3

Abstract

Fuzzy logic due to its nature of characterizing each case with multiple values offers a rich field of resources covering the assessment of situations characterized by a degree of vagueness and/or uncertainty. In this paper, we apply a new trapezoidal fuzzy assessment model (TRFAM) for measuring students’ mathematical modeling (MM) skills. TRFAM is actually a variation of the commonly used in fuzzy logic centre of gravity (COG) defuzzification technique, which we have properly adapted and utilized in earlier papers as an assessment model. Our COG and TRFAM models focus on students’ quality performance by assigning greater coefficients to the higher scores. A classroom experiment is also presented, illustrating our results in practice. Through this experiment the above two models are compared to each other and also with two traditional assessment methods based on principles of bivalent logic (the calculation of means and of the GPA index) and some useful conclusions are drawn.

Keywords:
mathematical modeling (MM) fuzzy sets and logic centre of gravity (COG) defuzzification technique trapezoidal fuzzy assessment model (TRFAM)

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