Modeling Student’s Knowledge on Programming Using Fuzzy Techniques

In this paper we describe the student modeling component of a web-based educational application that teaches the programming language Pascal using fuzzy logic techniques. To build a student model we have to diagnose the needs, misconceptions and cognitive abilities of each individual student. However, student diagnosis is fraught with uncertainty, and one possible approach to deal with this is fuzzy student modeling. Thus, we choose fuzzy logic techniques to describe student’s knowledge level and cognitive abilities. Furthermore, we use a mechanism of rules over the fuzzy sets, which is triggered after any change of the students’ knowledge level of a domain concept, and update the students’ knowledge level of all related with this concept, concepts.