WIP — A modification to the case study method to teach students to read academic papers

摘要

Most learners are introduced to academic papers in their graduate work. Typically, most of us learn to read and understand these papers by reading many of them and listening to more senior colleagues and teachers describe and interpret these papers in the class or reading groups. As our experience grows we become better at this skill. There is a need to read papers in a particular research area to provide an understanding of what has been done in the area, and what questions remain unanswered. We describe a work-in-progress to help teach students to read academic papers and build a base understanding of a field under the broad framework of case studies adopted and developed by business educators. This approach requires students to prepare for a discussion on a particular case in a class, mostly, independent of the instructor. We have applied a number of these best practices from case study teaching and applied a modified approach to a sequence of papers a research area during a course. We applied our modified technique in 2015 with 10 students, and students commented on how the approach helped them, significantly, in being able to read and understand academic papers.