Abstract:

Requirements engineering is a complex and abstract process and therefore difficult to teach and learn. In general, students do not have a practical experience of real problems in the discipline; often it is hard for them to achieve a complete understanding of the role of requirements and of their impact, and also they misunderstand diverse concepts of the Requirements Engineering discipline. Over the years, several researchers have studied and proposed alternatives for a more effective teaching of this discipline; most of the works reinforces the need to expose students to more realistic and challenging environments, in order to provide a better practical insight into requirements engineering. In the other side, in several disciplines, many researches propose the use of problem-based learning (PBL) as a way to provide a practical learning of the content taught. In PBL, due to the emphasis on active’s acquisition of information and on student skills, there is a reliance on the student's ability to identify their own needs and their best way of learning. This paper makes a proposal of structuring the Requirements Engineering discipline by concomitantly applying PBL, to provide a practical and real view of the discipline, and the students' evaluation of their own learning styles, in order to help them in self-knowledge and in the development of new ways of improving their learning.

Keywords:

PBL, requirements engineering, learning, teaching.