Role playing for scholarly articles

Abstract

In attempting to read a scholarly article, learners (students) often struggle with problems of comprehension. It is likely that when a scholar writes a paper and discusses a new idea or a method within a particular discipline, they assume that readers have a scholarly background enabling them to understand the paper content in detail. Such an assumption is not justified, and there is evidence that students who are learning to carry out research for the first time find that understanding scholars' papers is not always an easy task. Deciding which RE (Requirement Elicitation) technique and tool to apply to issues can become complicated for educators constructing a learning approach which emphasises that group learners should read scholarly articles in a short time and be able to summarise the content from the article, while at the same time allowing learners to devise solutions that will, enhance their creativity and innovation, allowing them to explore how an idea in a paper could be integrated into an industry application. A case study in this paper introduces a university framework, which can be applied to aid students in their decision-making on selecting a presentation technique; that is, choosing role-playing as the appropriate technique for an effective learning outcome. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.