Soft Computing Approach to Determine Students’ Level of Comprehension Using a Mamdani Fuzzy System

Abstract

Comprehension is a measure of one’s understanding a given piece of information, however extensive or summarized, complex or simple. Self-evaluation of one’s level of understanding is a difficult task, with imprecise boundaries and vague ranges. Typically, educational institutions use examinations to evaluate a student’s understanding of a subject or topic, assigning a mark (i.e., test score) or a grade to the student. Nevertheless, this approach calls for an evaluation prior to an estimation of the extent of student’s understanding. In contrast, this treatise proposes a method to self-evaluate one’s level of understanding, before an assessment, with an intent to highlight the deficient areas in one’s grasp of the concepts that need to be improved, before taking an examination. Using a simple questionnaire, to obtain inputs from the student, and a Mamdani fuzzy inference system (FIS) to process the inputs, the proposed model determines the level of understanding of a student, based on a three-level comprehension guide.