The Effect of High School Accounting on the Selection of College Major, Performance, Satisfaction, and Retention

The objective of this study is to examine the impact completion of a high school accounting course has on the selection of college major, academic performance in introductory accounting courses, satisfaction with one’s major, and retention. These relations are examined using data from a survey given to 208 students of various majors enrolled in the Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Multiple linear regression analyses were used to analyze the data. The results provide evidence of a significant positive relation between high school accounting and two variables: selection of college major, and performance in introduction to managerial accounting. The results also provide evidence consistent with a moderately significant relation between high school accounting and retention. The results do not show any significant relation between high school accounting and performance in introduction to financial accounting or major satisfaction. Overall, the results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the effect high school accounting can have on the development of future accounting professionals

Investigating novice programming mistakes: educator beliefs vs. student data

Educators often form opinions on which programming mistakes novices make most often - for example, in Java: "they always confuse equality with assignment", or "they always call methods with the wrong types". These opinions are generally based solely on personal experience. We report a study to determine if programming educators form a consensus about which Java programming mistakes are the most common. We used the Blackbox data set to check whether the educators' opinions matched data from over 100,000 students - and checked whether this agreement was mediated by educators' experience. We found that educators formed only a weak consensus about which mistakes are most frequent, that their rankings bore only a moderate correspondence to the students in the Blackbox data, and that educators' experience had no effect on this level of agreement. These results raise questions about claims educators make regarding which errors students are most likely to commit

Philosophers’ Views on the Use of Non-Essay Assessment Methods: Discussion of an E-Mail Survey

This paper presents and discusses the results of an email survey which asked participants to share their views on the efficacy of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or matching questions as evaluation methods in philosophy courses. First, the structure of the survey and its contents are explained. Next, responses are broken down along the lines of student responses and teacher responses. In both cases, there was significant disagreement among respondents, though there were notable patterns emerged. Student arguments in favor of non-essay assessment emphasized the expedience; arguments against emphasized the inadequacy of such evaluation methods to the nuances of philosophical material. Teacher responses echoed student responses but included considerations of fairness, ambiguity in student answers, student motivation, and justifications for non-essay assessment in specific contexts. Finally, the author discusses respondents’ opinions on whether philosophy departments should ban non-essay questions. The author concludes by suggesting that the results of this survey merit attention as an indication of how widespread the difficulties of non-essay assessment are and as an indication of the diversity of views on the subject

The Transformation of Accounting Information Systems Curriculum in the Last Decade

Accounting information systems (AIS) are an extremely important component of accounting and accounting education. The purpose of the current study is to examine the transformation of accounting information systems (AIS) curriculum in the last decade. The motivation for this research comes from the vast advances made in the world of information technology (IT) and information systems (IS). The specific research questions addressed in the current study are: (1) how has AIS curriculum changed in the 18 years since SOX? (2) How has AIS curriculum adjusted in recent years with the emergence of the new hot-button topic big data/data analytics? Overall, this study finds that the core of AIS curriculum has not significantly changed over the last decade. However, more emphasis is being placed on topics such as enterprise wide systems/ERP, IT audits, computer fraud, and transaction-processing. Related, several new topical coverages have been introduced such as business analysts and big data/data analytics. The key contribution of this paper is to provide accounting students and accounting educators with useful information regarding the most significant shifts in AIS over the last decade and insight into the most valuable current AIS topics

Research on learning: Potential for improving college ecology teaching

Provides pedagogical insight concerning learners' pre-conceptions and misconceptions about ecology The resource being annotated is: http://www.dlese.org/dds/catalog_DLESE-000-000-003-202.htm

‘Economics with training wheels’: Using blogs in teaching and assessing introductory economics

Blogs provide a dynamic interactive medium for online discussion, consistent with communal constructivist pedagogy. This paper explores the use of blogs in the teaching and assessment of a small (40-60 students) introductory economics paper. The role of blogs as a teaching, learning and assessment tool are discussed. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected across four semesters, students’ participation in the blog assessment is found to be associated with student ability, gender, and whether they are distance learners. Importantly, students with past economics experience do not appear to crowd out novice economics students. Student performance in tests and examinations does not appear to be associated with blog participation after controlling for student ability. However, students generally report overall positive experiences with the blog assessment

User resistance strategies and the problems of blanket prescriptions: a case study of resistance success

There is a growing body of research on resistance in IS projects, a good deal of which focuses on strategies for overcoming resistance. However, within this strand of research, it appears that there is a ‘blanket prescription’ approach that does not account for diversity in resistance reasoning. We offer a qualitative study of the response of diverse actors to a pilot of a custom developed client tracking information system, which brought about diverse covert and overt resistance activities. This empirical research is used to explore the heterogeneous user and how such a ‘blanket prescription’ to avert organisational-wide resistance went wrong and how resistance succeeded. This paper aims to contribute to the body of existing literature on IS user resistance by emphasizing the injurious continuous error of excluding such constructs as the heterogeneous user within user resistance research

Teaching Accounting and Finance to non-specialists: revealing the students' perspective on the learning experience

This study is concerned with the non-specialist accounting and finance students’ perspective on the usefulness, scope, and practical application of relevant modules within their program of study. It also evaluates relevant teaching and learning approaches adopted by accounting academics teaching non-specialist - instead of introductory - accounting modules, through revealing the students' perceptions on the effectiveness of these approaches in creating a high quality learning experience. Lectures' teaching competencies are rated first in terms of importance for their learning experience by the vast majority of students. Issues relevant to the curricula's 'real world' application, as well as, the development of clear links between lecture material and assessment practise, engrossed considerable attention by the respondents. Education technology and reading material on the other hand appeared to be of prior importance for a smaller number of students