Justification: Education, in general, and public education in particular, is always a forefront issue in any country’s development policy. A worldwide deep-accepted argument asserts that “no country has ever succeeded if it has not educated its people”. It is also broadly recognized that education plays a decisive role in socio-economic development, being a relevant factor for wealth creation and reduction of poverty. Educated people tend to be environment-friendly and, consequently, care for sustainability. Fostering education, therefore, is a necessary move towards a better world.

Fostering education, however, comprises many complex activities. A relevant one is evaluation. Traditional educational evaluation falls into two broad categories: formative and summative. Formative evaluations are conducted during program/project development and implementation and prove useful for providing direction on the ways to best achieve goals or improve program/project. Summative evaluations should be conducted once programs/projects are well established, and are expected to provide information on the extent the program/project is achieving its goals. So, the goals of the education program or project are the key factors in the summative category, determining the form by which evaluation should be conducted. Obviously, those goals, generally involving similar educational targets, have direct relation to the educational methodologies adopted, and, in turn, to the evaluation approach utilized.

The Tele-Classroom Methodology (TCM) adopted in the Travessia Project (TP) differs from the traditional one deployed in the public system in various ways. The most prominent way is that TCM emphasizes teaching the students to learn by themselves, utilizing a process that comprises five specific movements: integration, contextualization, socialization, problematization/reflection and practical application. In this respect, TCM can be understood as a socio-pedagogical experience whose goals are the development of skills and competencies as well as citizenship formation of students. While traditional methodologies also aim at these goals, they do not proceed to attain them the way TCM does. Through the years of deployment, TCM has been reported (although rather informally) very much positively influential on TP students’ attitudes and behaviors, revealing impacts on different dimensions of their lives. Therefore, evaluation of attainment of TP goals might well be performed by utilizing the impacts of TP on students’ lives as perceived by the students themselves. This was what has been assumed as the central element of assessment in the Travessia experiment.

To perform such an evaluation, however, a novel approach was needed, which could capture students’ perceptions of changes in different aspects of their attitudes and behaviors, and relate them, in terms of relative importance, to five ordinarily classified dimensions of life: personal, family, social, professional and future expectation. That relative importance would be assessed via TP teachers’ perceptions, based on the assumption that their close interaction with the students comprised the best ingredients for expliciting such. Afterwards, those perceptions would have to be aggregated in a formal related way to express the impacts. The chosen approach fell on a fuzzy relational heuristics, which draws on the nowadays unquestionable potential of fuzzy logic inference systems in manipulating human perceptions. The core of Fuzzy Logics is the ability to traduce cognitive information in mathematics with ability to work with a result precise enough to take decisions. It is possible by the use of triangular and trapezoidal numbers, most common in fuzzy subset systems.