Amir Hossein Shahballa - PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Tehran, Kish International Campus
Behzad Ghonsooly - Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Hosein Karami - Assistant Professor of English Department, University of Tehran

Multiple-choice tests do not assess examinees’ knowledge in accord with reality. In fact, the partial knowledge of examinees is not assessed. Providing a new approach to the assessment of reading comprehension in the framework of fuzzy logic, this study aims to measure this partial knowledge. In this approach, participants have to choose as many correct options as there are considering the stem. Therefore, the correct answer to each question can range from one option to all options. For the first session, an expository and an argumentative genre, and for the second session, the reading section of a TOEFL test was used. The results showed that the approach is fairer as it considers the partial knowledge of the examinees while in other common multiple-choice tests this is ignored. Also, the use of idea units as the units comprising a text gives us clues regarding the degree of difficulty of different parts of a text as well as clues about why misunderstanding may occur of the same text among different people.

Reading comprehension, Fuzzy Logic, Multiple-choice tests, Partial knowledge, Fair assessment