Daniel Doz / Mara Cotič / Darjo Felda Fuzzy logic in educational assessment

About this book

Educational assessment is a central yet persistently contested component of educational systems worldwide. It plays a decisive role in shaping instructional practices, guiding educational policy, certifying achievement, and influencing learners’ academic trajectories and self-perceptions.

Despite its centrality, assessment remains fraught with conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges. One of the most enduring problems concerns the tension between the inherently complex, gradual, and context-dependent nature of learning and the widespread reliance on assessment systems that reduce performance to crisp scores, rigid categories, or binary decisions.

In response to these challenges, researchers and practitioners have explored alternative assessment paradigms that better reflect the complexity of learning processes. Among these, fuzzy logic has emerged as a particularly promising theoretical and methodological framework. Originally introduced by Zadeh (1965) to model vagueness and imprecision in human reasoning, fuzzy logic extends classical set theory by allowing degrees of membership rather than strict inclusion or exclusion.

The relevance of fuzzy logic to educational assessment lies in its capacity to model gradual transitions, borderline cases, and multi-criteria judgments in a mathematically rigorous yet conceptually flexible way. Educational judgments are rarely absolute; teachers routinely evaluate student work using qualitative descriptors, professional judgment, and contextual information. Fuzzy logic provides a formal mechanism for translating such judgments into systematic assessment models without forcing artificial precision or unjustified dichotomies.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive and theoretically informed exploration of fuzzy logic in educational assessment. It brings together foundational theory, methodological approaches, empirical applications, and critical reflections to offer readers a deep understanding of how fuzzy logic can be used to rethink assessment in education.

By situating fuzzy assessment models within broader debates on learning, measurement, and educational quality, the book seeks to contribute not only to technical innovation but also to the ongoing re-conceptualization of what it means to assess learning in complex educational systems.