What is it?

Role play is a form of experiential learning that promotes collaborative learning practices using authentic scenarios and problems. A role play requires students to take on roles and act out the role following the parameters and rules that have been set up.

Why use it?

Evidence suggests that educators and students experience satisfaction with assessment as learning through role play, games and simulation (Russell & Shepherd, 2010).
Students apply knowledge in practical real-world scenarios and develop effective interpersonal skills.
To help evaluate student’s decision making and interpersonal communication skills.
Participation encourages students to reflect on their knowledge of a subject while playing their role, to appreciate the relevance of diverse opinions, and empathise with the position and feelings of others.

How do I do it?

Clearly outline the problem or scenario such as the context, scene etc.
Consider the practical limitations of playing out the role play and adjust the task design as necessary.
Develop student’s skills in reflective practice; use a blog or journal during the role play or simulation, and afterwards to assess students’ participation and to evaluate the role play or simulation as a learning.

Considerations

Provide clear and explicit information as to what is expected of students.
Align the task with the learning outcomes and structure it accordingly.
Can be used for formative feedback and summative assessment
In an online environment you can use:
- vUWS Group tool
- vUWS Journal or Blog tools for reflection task
- Learning Studio or Collaborative Learning

Role play pedagogy and examples

For a brief summary of role play pedagogy to here – https://ablconnect.harvard.edu/role-play-research

This article outlines the pedagogy, considerations and how to construct and design a role play.

https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/activelearning/2019/08/20/role-play/

For using a role play as an assessment go here – https://www.teaching.unsw.edu.au/assessing-role-play-and-simulation

See Baker et al. (2022) for a discussion of the opportunities to use role plays in the mental health space and Junus et al. (2022) for a discussion of using asynchronous technologies to implement role plays.

References

Baker, I.S., Turner, I.J. & Kotera, Y. Role-play Games (RPGs) for Mental Health (Why Not?): Roll for Initiative. Int J Ment Health Addiction (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-022-00832-y

Junus, K., Santoso, H. B., & Ahmad, M. (2022). Experiencing the community of inquiry framework using asynchronous online role-playing in computer-aided instruction class. Education and Information Technologies , 27 (2), 2283–2309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10670-5

Russell, C. and Shepherd, J. (2010), Online role-play environments for higher education. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41: 992-1002. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01048.x