Students' perceptions of accounting

Research shows that many students have a misguided impression about accounting and negative stereotypical perceptions about the role of accountants (Cory, 1992; Mladenovic, 2000). Many students equate accounting with bookkeeping and perceive accounting to be a boring number-crunching activity, driven by procedures and rules, and performed by individuals working alone (Fisher & Murphy, 1995; Inman et. al., 1989). Perceptions such as 'accounting is dull in content and unadventurous in mode' are particularly common among first year accounting students (Buckmaster & Craig, 2000, p.375). As Christensen (2004, p.119) reports, 'our first year students just knew accounting was as boring as watching paint dry'. Accounting, it appears, is something that students already knew about - a concept of debit and credit that has to be meticulously placed and has to produce one correct answer (Christensen, 2004).

Similar experiences have been reported in the literature that students have pre-conceived ideas about accounting education, that it is something to be memorized, (see for example Adams et. al., 1994; Caldwell et. al., 1996) or that teachers will show them the procedures to follow. The result is that students view their role in this context as passive recipients of information, lacking interest and initiative in learning accounting (Marriott & Marriott, 2003) and refusing to participate particularly in tutorials (Keddie & Trotter, 1998) unless the activity forms part of graded assessment.

مواضيع ذات صلة

Results, analysis and discussions Facilitating active-learning through formative assessment in a collaborative learning environment

Research methodology

Literature review Pedagogical practices in accounting education

Formative and Summative Assessment and the Notion of Constructive Alignment

Concluding remarks

Alignment of curriculum, teaching and assessment

Assessment protocols

Managing the learning process

Teaching methods

Learning methods

Teaching protocols

Recasting the curriculum