MEASURING STUDENTS MODELING CAPACITIES: A FUZZY APPROACH

A central aim of educational research in the area of mathematical modeling and applications is to recognize the attainment level of students at defined states of the modeling process. In this paper, we introduce principles of fuzzy sets theory and possibility theory to describe the process of mathematical modeling in the classroom. The main stages of the modeling process are represented as fuzzy sets in a set of linguistic labels indicating the degree of a student’s success in each of these stages. We use the total possibilistic uncertainty on the ordered possibility distribution of all student profiles as a measure of the students’ modeling capacities and illustrate our results by application to a classroom experiment.