Issues in Accounting Education

The purpose of this article is to expose accounting faculty to an accounting negotiation course to inspire them to consider teaching such a course. Professional standards recognize the auditor's dual responsibility to detect material misstatements and to ensure their appropriate resolution. However, accounting education has focused primarily on the first responsibility of designing and performing appropriate audit procedures to detect material misstatements, and not on negotiation skills to ensure their proper resolution (Trotman et al. 2005). This article provides a detailed overview of the author's half-semester graduate elective accounting negotiation course that may become a required course in the near future.

Data Availability: Interested parties can obtain copies of all course materials by contacting the author.

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.

This position paper proposes a viable alternative to higher education's current focus on student ratings as the primary metric for summative teaching evaluations (i.e., for personnel decisions). In contrast to the divergent opinions among educational researchers about the validity of student ratings, a strong consensus exists that summative measures derived from the student ratings process represent a necessary rather than a sufficient source for evaluating teaching performance (Cashin 1990; Berk 2005). Accordingly, to more completely describe annual teaching performance, we propose a multisource, multiple-perspective Teaching Balanced Scorecard (TBSC), fashioned from the “classic” Balanced Scorecard developed by Kaplan and Norton (1992a). The TBSC can guide academic administrators to expand their conceptual view of teaching performance beyond the boundaries of the classroom, while coherently communicating the department's teaching expectations to the faculty; consistent with this proposition, we provide supporting evidence from a successful TBSC implementation in an academic department.

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 focus of this paper is to examine China's process of convergence with international accounting standards, through a review of the history and through the experiences of its accounting academics. The review of China's accounting history establishes a framework for understanding the current standards. The experiences of Chinese academics during the convergence process are of particular interest to other academics, and offer insight into the training and development of an internationalized accounting profession.

To gain insights from the Chinese academics, we conducted interviews with ten professors, and solicited comments, suggestions, and advice from these academics. These academics report between 6 to 50 years of experience in Chinese accounting education. The focus of our interviews was to gain an understanding of the forces and circumstances that characterized the period during which China changed from an internal, rules-based accounting system to a system that has now achieved significant progress toward convergence with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The insights from these Chinese accounting professors will be of interest to educators in other countries that are dealing with IFRS-related issues in their curriculum.

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.

In 2005, IFRS became mandatory for consolidated financial statements of French-listed companies. Our students had increasingly international backgrounds, internships, and jobs after graduation. Therefore, we felt the need to modify our French GAAP-based introductory accounting class to a course using IFRS. This article describes the challenges we faced and the solutions we adopted. Since French GAAP are rules-based and IFRS principles-based, the adoption of IFRS modified our learning goals, the learning strategy, and the assessment methods. We changed from a bookkeeping-oriented approach to one in which students have to define and analyze various transactions with respect to the conceptual framework using broader economic and financial concepts. We also had to modify student behavior from a learning attitude of repeating answers to one of finding answers, which meant further developing their analytical, synthesis, and judgment skills. Class material had to be adjusted to better reflect the complex reality and to allow students to make judgments, thus raising the question to what degree of detail certain topics are taught. This new approach also raised challenges in terms of providing feedback to students, grading, and student evaluation. By raising awareness about these issues, we want to contribute to a smoother transition when switching accounting classes from local GAAP to IFRS in other countries.

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.