Business education continues to be very popular among students across the globe, however, business schools have been criticised for not preparing 'work-ready' graduates. This paper investigates how ...business schools enhance organisational reputation, and in particular, how relatively younger and non-accredited business schools compete with longstanding business schools and those with established reputations. In so doing, the paper investigates the reputation drivers that are perceived to give business schools a competitive advantage. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with academics, experts and students. The results of this paper indicate that engagement with industry and the community is considered the key to achieving quality business programmes and to producing quality business graduates. In addition, we found that the two emerging themes of work placement (WP) and transnational education (TNE) programmes also contributed to quality business programmes but not without some risks.
The use of online lecture recordings as a supplement to physical lectures is an increasingly popular tool at many universities. This article combines survey data with student record data for students ...in a University of Western Australia first year Microeconomics Principles class to examine the relative effects of lecture attendance and online lecture recordings. The main finding is that students using the online lectures as a substitute for attending lectures are ultimately at a fairly severe disadvantage in terms of their final marks. Moreover, students attending few face to face lectures do not close this gap by viewing more lectures online. In contrast to this, students who attend the majority of lectures in person do receive a benefit from additional use of the lecture recordings. The results provide empirical evidence that, when used as a complementary tool, lecture recordings are a valuable supplement for students. However, when used as a substitute to attending lectures, lecture recordings provide no additional benefit. Author abstract, ed
Reliable, consistent assessment process that produces comparable assessment grades between assessors and institutions is a core activity and an ongoing challenge with which universities have failed ...to come to terms. In this paper, we report results from an experiment that tests the impact of an intervention designed to reduce grader variability and develop a shared understanding of national threshold learning standards by a cohort of reviewers. The intervention involved consensus moderation of samples of accounting students' work, with a focus on three research questions. First, what is the quantifiable difference in grader variability on the assessment of learning outcomes in 'application skills' and 'judgement'? Second, does participation in the workshops lead to reduced disparity in the assessment of the students' learning outcomes in 'application skills' and 'judgement'? Third, does participation in the workshops lead to greater confidence by reviewers in their ability to assess students' skills in application skills and judgement? Our findings suggest consensus moderation does reduce variability across graders and also builds grader confidence.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to determine the requirements of accounting graduates in relation to generic attributes. Employers have consistently maintained that graduates are deficient in ...this area. This Australia‐wide, all‐sector study addresses the issue by examining what employers mean when they make demands for universities and academics to deliver work‐ready graduates.
Design/methodology/approach
Interviews (recorded, transcribed and analysed with NVivo) with employers, and accounting professional bodies were conducted to ascertain their views of their needs of accounting graduates into the future.
Findings
Employers held the generic attributes of communication, team work and self‐management to be the most critical for graduates in the three areas of recruitment, training and ongoing employment. Demands on universities to deliver work‐ready graduates are not homogeneous. Employers in different sectors construe the meaning of generic attributes in line with their specific needs.
Originality/value
The study was an original piece of work that gauged the opinions of professional accounting bodies and employers of accounting graduates across Australia and in all sectors of the accounting profession. The value of the study is to inform academics as to the ranked importance of generic attributes but also alert them to the different meanings that are assigned to these skills by employers in different sectors.
Evidencing student achievement of standards is a growing imperative worldwide. Key stakeholders (including current and prospective students, government, regulators and employers) want confidence that ...threshold learning standards in an accounting degree have been assured. Australia's new higher education regulatory environment requires that student achievements are benchmarked against intended programme learning outcomes, guided by published disciplinary standards and a national qualifications framework, and against other higher education providers. Here, we report on a process involving academics from 10 universities, aided by professional practitioners, to establish and equip assessors to reliably assure threshold learning standards in accounting that are nationally comparable. Importantly, we are learning more about how standards are interpreted. Based on the premise that meaning is constructed from tacit experiences, social interactions and intentional reflection on explicit information, we report outcomes of three multi-part calibration interventions, situated around judgements of the quality of the written communication skills exhibited in student work and their related assessment tasks. Qualitative data from 30 participants in the calibration process suggest that they perceive that the process both assists them both in developing a shared understanding of the accounting threshold learning standards and in the redesign of assessment tasks to more validly assess the threshold learning standards.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
During 2010, minimum academic standards for Australian bachelor and master degree programmes in accounting were formulated. These were developed for a new higher education system predicated on ...expansion, including participation targets and demand-driven funding for public institutions, and a centralised regulatory and quality assurance system to support consumer protection covering all providers. In 2011 a pilot project involving 25% of Australian universities that provide accounting education, is underway to assess achievement of graduating student outcomes against nationally agreed academic standards. The benchmarking process involves double-blind external peer review. It will be expanded in 2012 to embrace other universities and non-university providers including emerging providers from both the private sector and the vocational education sector.
The ability to communicate - orally and in writing - is a graduate attribute that employers in many countries rank as number one in importance, aside from relevant qualifications. This paper reports ...the implementation and evaluation of a collaborative peer assessment and self-assessment learning and teaching (L&T) initiative, which was designed to improve postgraduate students' judgment of writing standards and to improve their own writing - according to that standard. The initiative was embedded in an introductory financial accounting unit in an Australian university. In a mixed methods study, the matched pair design revealed improvements in the written communication skills of students as determined by an independent assessor. There was also statistically significant improvement in the ability of students to apply assessment standards to grammatical, structural and presentation components of written communication. Whereas it was not possible to attribute the improvements entirely to the collaborative peer assessment initiative, our observations and students' self-reporting comments suggest that the L&T initiative was effective.
This paper explores the relative influence of the accounting academy and accountancy professional associations in the debate concerning the profile and quality of accounting education research. This ...research analyses 13 semi-structured interviews undertaken with members of key accounting professional associations in Australia, New Zealand (ANZ) and the United Kingdom and Ireland (UKI). The paper makes a theoretical contribution by the novel application of the institutional logics theory to the literature concerning professional accounting associations (PAAs) demonstrating the dominant commercial logic of the education function and the more traditional fiduciary logic of the technical function. The research finds that the primary stakeholders in the professional accounting curriculum development model are the PAAs and employers, whilst the accounting academy is relatively absent. The relative independence of the education and research and technical functions within PAAs is also identified: academic research and technical activity has little influence on professional education and vice versa. However, PAAs’ funding of academic research is common across all four countries for brand recognition and in some instances to influence policy rather than informing the professional curriculum.
•TAPs provide a unique insight into troublesome concepts in consolidation accounting.•Verbal reports expose student thought processes when dealing with different issues.•TAPs greatly enhance the ...development of an online adaptive learning resource.•Capturing the student voice can potentially transform educational practices.
This paper reports on the use of Think Aloud Protocols (TAPs) to identify the concepts in consolidated financial statements that students may find difficult to master. Consolidated Financial Statements is a topic taught normally in Intermediate Accounting that is known to pose a challenge to students (Murphy & McCarthy, 2010). In this study, we use TAPs to capture a participant’s immediate thoughts while performing tasks related to consolidated financial statements. TAPs offer the opportunity to hear the student’s voice in their strategies to solve a question and provide a unique insight into concepts, terminology and parts of the consolidation process that students may experience as troublesome. These insights will be used to develop a future project of an adaptive learning resource to support student mastery of threshold financial accounting concepts. This paper extends our understanding of the use of TAPs in Accounting and the research methodology employed in this paper could be applied to other teaching innovations.
The relationship between teaching and research in the modern university has been the subject of vigorous scholarly enquiry in the education literature for several decades. Few international ...comparative studies are reported in the literature. This study compares and discusses the teaching-research nexus (TRN) in accounting in three international regions: the UK and Ireland (UKI); Australia and New Zealand (ANZ); and South Africa (SA). The purpose of this study is to provide evidence of that the TRN empirical model operates in the different regions, and more so to describe the TRN that remains challenging for the accounting academic profession globally. Positive synergies from the TRN are evident in all jurisdictions in this study but are largely ignored by academic institutions and professional accounting bodies (PABs) that influence the university accounting curriculum. Formal government research assessment measures, coupled by PABs pressures, result in accounting becoming more a teaching-led rather than research-informed academic discipline. This has implications for: the status of accounting academics; the public perception of the professional standing of accounting in society; and the learning experiences of accounting students.
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