Issues in Accounting Education

Professional organizations, accrediting bodies, and accounting educators have defined the competencies that accounting students need for entry-level success in public accounting. However, definitions of the competencies required by all accounting students for long-term career requirements are lacking, as is an understanding of how to develop these competencies within the accounting curriculum. In 2010 the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) and the Management Accounting Section (MAS) of the American Accounting Association (AAA) formed a Task Force to address these issues and make curriculum recommendations for all accounting majors. This paper is a report of that Task Force. It is responsive to the recent call to “connect the accounting body of knowledge to a map of competencies” and to create “curricular models for the future” (Pathways Commission 2012, 37, 75), and it includes a literature review that spans the scope and focus of accounting education, the value proposition for accounting (i.e., specification as to how accountants today, working in a variety of settings, add organizational value), and the importance of competency integration. This review leads to four recommendations. First, accounting education should be oriented toward long-term career demands. Second, the focus of accounting education should include organizational settings beyond the current focus on public accounting/auditing. Third, educational objectives should reflect how accountants add organizational value. Fourth, these objectives should be developed as integrated competencies. These recommendations lead to the competency-based educational Framework presented in this paper. This Framework is intended to apply to a variety of career paths including, but not limited to, public accounting. The paper concludes with a call to accountants in all areas to participate in further development of the Framework.

Previous rankings of accounting literature have largely ignored the subtopic of accounting education research. Given the important role that rankings play in creating incentives and benchmarks, ranking education research may improve both the quality and quantity of research in this subtopic. This paper ranks academic institutions and individual accounting researchers based on their production of accounting education research. We show that the correlation between education research rankings and singular, noneducation research rankings is very low (i.e., ranges from 0.20 to 0.31), emphasizing the importance of considering education rankings separately from other topical areas in accounting research. We also provide evidence of the institutional factors that contribute to producing accounting education research and when professors produce this type of research in their careers. These findings will likely be of interest to current faculty, administrators, and industry leaders as they make decisions based on accounting education research.

JEL Classifications: M4; M40; M41; M49.

Data Availability: Requests for data may be made to the authors.

Brazil is a rare case of a complete adoption of IFRS, not only for consolidated financial statements, but also for the individual ones. Very few countries dared to converge their accounting standards toward IFRS in the company-only financial statements, probably afraid of the tax or dividends impact. Brazil made the ambitious move, changing the Company law and altering the income tax legislation in such a way that a safe path was built to bridge from the old BR GAAP standards to IFRS.

This study examines whether the effectiveness of online accounting education relative to traditional in-class delivery depends upon the level of the course. Students enrolled in principles and advanced cost/managerial and in advanced financial accounting courses were surveyed regarding their perceptions on several dimensions. The results suggest that the course level is important when assessing whether it is advisable to offer online accounting courses. In advanced courses, the outcomes examined were significantly more favorable for traditional classroom environments than for online, while the delivery mode was not important in principles courses when controlling for other variables. The results also provide further support for the notion that blended learning, i.e., offering a few on-campus class meetings for a predominately online course, may be desirable regardless of course level, but that course level is potentially important when deciding upon the mix of face-to-face versus online instruction.

Data Availability: Available upon request.

The values that younger (Millennial) versus older (non-Millennial) students express in choosing a class are contrasted with the skills and attitudes they need to compete. The first half of the paper reviews current literature regarding Millennial student expectations, skill competitiveness, and work opportunities. This is followed by examining priorities on class section selection as a vehicle for investigating student values. The source of this data is an undergraduate state university business program populated by middle class, mostly white students. Survey data from 275 students in accounting classes is analyzed to ascertain the importance attached to 14 class attributes. The overall results suggest that instructors face a major motivational challenge. Student ratings indicate relatively low importance is attached to developing skills associated with professional success. The Millennial student response appears even further out of alignment with global labor market reality by placing a significantly higher value on low workload and less importance on analytical and computational assignments.

Developing communication skills is an objective of many accounting education programs. Students' communication apprehension may hamper this. This study explores South African accounting students' communication apprehension and the association thereof with culture and home and instruction language. Data were collected using the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24) and Written Communication Apprehension (WCA) self-report questionnaires. South Africa provides an example of the salience of race, given past racial segregation. Culture is, however, more complex than physical appearance. Significant differences were identified in communication apprehension between students from previously disadvantaged African communities attending poorly resourced schools, and African and White students attending well-resourced, Westernized schools. Further, this study suggests that students who receive instruction in the business language in which they are to function as graduates exhibit less communication apprehension in that language, regardless of their home language. While this study considers South African students, the results may be of interest in other multicultural or multilingual environments, particularly where socio-economic differences pervade. The adoption of pedagogy to remedy the communication apprehension of a student may aggravate the apprehension of another. To limit such unintended consequence, instructors need to look beyond appearance in anticipating a student's predisposition to communication apprehension.

We compile and analyze the reference lists from papers published in nine accounting journals over the period 1996–2011 to identify the individual antecedent works that have been cited the most often by accounting research. We conduct our analyses separately for different topical areas (audit, financial, managerial, tax, other) and research methodologies (archival, experimental, theoretical, other). We then present and discuss lists of the individual works that are most heavily cited by each category. Our results should be useful to Ph.D. students and those who train them in identifying important prior work that continues to motivate and provide a foundation for contemporary accounting research.

Self-regulated learning skills have been shown to have a positive impact on achievement in the academic setting, enabling graduates to become lifelong learners in professional settings. Although the importance of lifelong learning skills is well articulated in the accounting education literature, this study is the first to address concerns that class time devoted to developing such skills might impair students' acquisition of content knowledge.

This study uses a quasi-experimental design within the context of the introductory accounting course. The treatment group received self-regulated learning interventions designed by the researcher and based on Zimmerman's model of the academic learning cycle.

Results of this study were obtained using multiple regressions and suggest that students' acquisition of technical knowledge, as measured by conventional exam scores, was not compromised when class time was allocated between self-regulated learning interventions and content instruction. Although benefits of the treatment were not immediate, the treatment group outperformed the control group in terms of scores on exams administered near the end of the course. This study found no evidence of a “ceiling effect” but does provide limited support for the “Matthew effect,” whereby higher ability students often reap the greatest benefit from interventions.

Many academic accountants have explicit or implicit motivations to publish their research in the best journals in the discipline. However, whether the chances of success are better at some of these journals is unknown. This paper examines the archival record to find differences within the authorship of three such publications (The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics) over a recently completed 20-year period. The journals do not differentiate according to the authors' doctoral training, but are differently sensitive to place of faculty employment. The journals are equally receptive to non-U.S. authors, but different in their receptivity to recently graduated and frequently appearing authors. Although areas of change over time are noted, both among journals and within each journal itself, the record also shows a good deal of consistency in other relationships over the 20-year period.

South Africa has for many years been involved in and supported the work of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) (formerly the International Accounting Standards Committee [IASC]). Accordingly, South Africa was an early adopter of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). This paper highlights two significant effects that the adoption of IFRS has had on accounting education in South Africa. First, both “English” and “Afrikaans” universities have faced, to varying degrees, the challenge of shifting from rule-based pedagogy to framework-based teaching of financial reporting. Second, the Afrikaans universities' primary source of reference for their financial reporting students, namely the financial reporting standards, is no longer available in Afrikaans and as a result introduces the risks and complexities associated with the translation from English into Afrikaans.