Abstract:

A learning style can be viewed as an approach or way of learning involving an educational method which allows the best possible learning experience for an individual. Until now the evaluation of the style of the student learning was given, in most of the cases, by means of a survey provided by the experts concerning general attitudes and feelings of the student towards a specific course. In this kind of surveys the answer of each question corresponds to a categorical value which commonly ranges from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. In this work we propose to extend the previous scale to a more flexible one by considering the so-called trapezoidal fuzzy sets. This kind of data is defined on a support ranging from nullity to fullness and it has been shown to be useful for describing people subjective perceptions. Specifically, the assessments of the students related to their learning style can be represented by using trapezoidal fuzzy sets. One of the most important advantages of a fuzzy scale is that it becomes richer and more expressive than the usual one, enabling to describe in a more informative way the usual answers in this context. The methodology proposed here is illustrated in a real-life learning style study as well as possible statistical strategies that can be applied in order to summarize the information provided by the survey.