Fuzzy Logic for Refining the Evaluation of Learners’ Performance in Online Engineering Education

Intelligent tutoring systems have been widely used for optimizing the educational process by creating a student-centered learning environment. As a matter of fact, an integral part of intelligent tutoring systems is the evaluation of the learners’ performance. In traditional learning, the instructors calculate the grade of the students derived from the assessment units and other factors, such as the difficulty of the exercises or their effort, in order to produce the final students’ score in the course. However, in most cases, the evaluation of learners’ performance in intelligent tutoring systems takes place by calculating an average grade of students without taking into account the aforementioned factors. In view of the above, this paper presents a novel way for refining the evaluation of students’ performance using fuzzy logic. As a testbed for our research, we have designed and implemented an intelligent tutoring system holding social networking characteristic for teaching the engineering course of “Compilers”. More specifically, the system is responsible for acquiring information about students such as their grades, the kinds of misconceptions, the level of tests’ difficulty as well as their effort including their social interaction, i.e. participation in forums, making comments in posts and posting regarding the educational process. Taking these into consideration, fuzzy logic model diagnoses the accuracy of students’ grade and the system suggests that the instructor redefine students’ grade properly. Our system was evaluated using t-test and the results show high accuracy and objectivity in the evaluation of students’ performance.