This paper represents a summary of a research report and the results of developing an educational software, including a multi-agent system for teaching accounting bases and financial accounting. The paper describes the
structure of the multi-agent system, defined as a complex network of s-agents. Each s-agent contains 6 pedagogical agents and a coordinator agent. We have defined a new architecture (BeSGOTE) that extends the BDI architecture for intelligent agents and we have defined a mixing-up relation among the accounts, presenting the way in which it can be used for testing students

Patrut, Bogdan

Munich Personal RePEc Archive

MPRA
Munich Personal RePEc Archive
Education in Accounting using an
Interactive System
Bogdan Patrut
Universitatea ”Vasile Alecsandri” din Bacau
1. March 2010
Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21325/
MPRA Paper No. 21325, posted 16. March 2010 12:45 UTC
Education in Accounting using an Interactive System 
 
Bogdan Pătruţ1,  
1 ”Vasile Alecsandri” University of Bacău, Faculty of Sciences,  
8 Spiru Haret, Bacău, Romania  
bogdan@edusoft.ro  
 
 
 
Abstract: This paper represents a summary of a research report and the results 
of developing an educational software, including a multi-agent system for 
teaching accounting bases and financial accounting. The paper describes the 
structure of the multi-agent system, defined as a complex network of s-agents. 
Each s-agent contains 6 pedagogical agents and a coordinator agent. We have 
defined a new architecture (BeSGOTE) that extends the BDI architecture for 
intelligent agents and we have defined a mixing-up relation among the 
accounts, presenting the way in which it can be used for testing students.  
Keywords: Computer Aided Education, Multi-Agent System, Artificial 
Intelligence, Accounting Education  
 
1. Computer Aided Education in Accounting 
The contemporary accounting schools is one based on competences, but we need to 
make the distinction between the assigned competences of an accountant while 
practicing his job in his office and the competences achieved by a university 
professional training program [1].  
The International Federation of Accountants [2] states very well the competences 
that should be acquired after graduating a professional training program on 
accounting. One of our research purposes is to establish the skills that should be 
acquired by studying “The Bases of Accounting”. These competences will be 
acquired by the students as a result of teaching some learning units and we consider 
that the accounting analysis is a key element in learning the accounting. 
The Computer Aided Education facilitates the student’s access to more information 
well organized, variedly structured that can be viewed in different variants. 
Obviously, this way of education uses the new information and communication 
technologies in a direct way, but the pedagogical effects are the result of using 
different interactive software. When it comes to the Computer Aided Education the 
main role is played by the student and it takes into account his/her heredity, 
experience, perspectives, training, talents, abilities and needs. The using of the 
educational software on the accounting is motivated, in our opinion both by the 
2      Bogdan Pătruţ1, 
pedagogical factors and by the dynamic of the financial-accounting legislation, the 
permanent need for new specialists, and the new valences of the accounting 
profession. 
There are some international achievements in the field of using the interactive 
systems and e-learning in accounting, like [3], [18], [19] that highlighted the 
differences between an interactive educational system and a real teacher. Thus, we 
need to include the intelligent technologies in the educational software in order to 
make them efficient and as real as possible to teachers. 
2. ContTest - The Multi-agent System for Accounting Education  
Certain software applications (Jennings, 98) need the use of some intelligent agents 
that are autonomous and flexible programs designed to reach their goals without the 
further intervention of the programmer. In our opinion, in some situations there is 
necessary to endow the intelligent agents with new characteristics, closer to those of a 
human agent. Thus, we consider that for humanizing a software agent, it is necessary 
to integrate an affective subsystem (Bartneck, 03), (OCC, 88), (Pfeifer, 88), (Bates, 
92), and the agent should be endowed with a “body” either in real or in the virtual 
space. In the virtual space it can be a conversational agent, which can behaves smartly 
if we will add to it some new elements: feelings, temperament, gestures and 
movements close to those of a human being (MSA, 02). 
Even though the intelligent agents have many advantages, some problems are 
distributed or they are very complex and they cannot be solved by a single agent. 
Thus consider the necessity of grouping the agents into multi-agent systems, which 
can be organized in different ways. We developed an original way of organizing the 
agents into groups, in a multi-agent system with pedagogical purposes. 
The multi-agent consists of many s-agents, which are small multi-agents systems, 
each s-agent dealing with an educational competence in the discipline to be learn. The 
multi-agent system was embedded in the educational software ContTest, which has 
the pedagogical functions of teaching and assessing the students’ knowledge on 
„Accounting bases” and partially on „Financial accounting”. 
To represent the accounting knowledge in our system, the representation of 
accounting entries uses the regular expressions, which are the most adequate for 
representing the accounting knowledge, because: 
• They help to define the rules of recording the transactions very exact. 
• They help non-specialists to learn the rules from financial accounting. 
• This meta-language allows the developing of programs for testing the people 
who learn the accounting. 
Based on this formalism we designed an intelligent agent which will automatically 
generate problems of financial accounting and their answers too. 
The system contains many groups of agents (s-agents), one s-agent per educational 
unit, and every s-agent contains agents with exact pedagogical tasks: teaching, testing, 
assessing etc. Each s-agent of the system has sensors that perceive the environment of 
the agent, and effectors through the agent acts on the environment. 
Education in Accounting using an Interactive System      3 
This is why, in the case of a s-agent, the environment is given by the actual 
student’s competences (abilities and knowledge). The sensors are mechanisms 
(questions, tests etc.) through which the agent in charge with achieving a competence 
can measure the degree in which that competence has been achieved; that means how 
much the student has learned up to that moment. The effectors are mechanisms 
(explanations information etc.) for improving the degree of the accounting 
competences of the student. 
We noticed that every s-agent cannot act alone, so we grouped the s-agents into a 
multi-agent system. Because the acquisition of a competence is permanently 
correlated with the acquisitions of the others, the s-agents have to communicate and 
cooperate, because their common goal is to teach the student. 
Each s-agent has seven atomic agents with specific pedagogical tasks. If at the 
level of the entire system, the nature of the cooperation between s-agents is related to 
the content of the teaching subject (The Bases of Accounting) then at the level of each 
s-agent we should have a didactical cooperation.  
In fact, there are six s-agents that deal with six pedagogical aspects, no matter the 
learning unit or the capacity that should be achieved by the student and a coordinator 
agent is responsible for intermediating between these six agents: 
• The agent for initial and permanent assessment generates questions and 
obtains correct answers, but it also expects the student’s answers. This agent 
has a layered architecture, every layer dealing with the checking of achieving 
one competence. 
• For the agent dealing with the teaching of the content of a lesson, we used the 
Microsoft Agent technology for animating a character and the multimedia 
technology too; for example we used video clips with a real person teaching a 
lesson. Mixing these two technologies can be very useful. 
• The agent for exemplifications was created in a similar way with the agent for 
teaching and the information for exemplification can be presented under 
different forms. The examples can be short or long focusing on different 
aspects that can lead to a better understanding of the theory of accounting. 
• The agent for generating problems for the student creates Romanian texts for 
questions, exercises and problems, depending on the instant learning unit. We 
have come to the conclusion that although generating the questions with two 
variants of answers is the easiest, generating of some problems is more 
efficient didactically speaking. Generating the problems is also more complex, 
because it means: generating a text in Romanian, generating some sums and 
mathematical expressions and generating the correct answers.  
We developed an evaluator of mathematical expressions used in generating some 
financial accounting problems, based on some patterns that have used regular 
expressions. The agent that checks the student’s answer has a multi-layered 
architecture and each layer analyzes the way the student answers the question that has 
been asked by the test-generating agent. 
4      Bogdan Pătruţ1, 
3. Results with ContTest 
There follows the presentation of a screen images taken during the using of the 
application; these images emphasizes different aspects from during teaching using 
this educational software (Figure 4, 5).  
 
 
Figure 5 The agents which teach the accounts rules 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig. 1. Verifying the accounting entries 
 
This agent will do a series of tasks, such as: statistics on the right answers, wrong 
answers, partially correct answers, inversions, confusions, big mistakes, calculation 
errors, delays, weak spots, strong spots etc; giving marks, scores, penalizing the 
student; expressing some feelings (satisfaction,  dissatisfaction, sadness, happiness, 
hope, fear etc.). We considered necessary to design original affective agent 
architecture (Be SGOTE) that allows feelings to be expressed.  
Sometimes showing some statistic data is not the best way of feedback that can be 
given to a person who learns something and solves some problems. It is 
recommended that after asking simple questions or after short periods of testing the 
teachers should show their attitudes towards the student’s results through verbal ways 
or even through their mimic and gestures. These ways can show the satisfaction or 
dissatisfaction towards the student’s results or hope and fear for reaching or not 
reaching the initial goals. 
 
Education in Accounting using an Interactive System      5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig. 2. The human-like agent, expressing sentiments about the state of the agent 
 
This agent will do a series of tasks, such as: statistics on the right answers, wrong 
answers, partially correct answers, inversions, confusions, big mistakes, calculation 
errors, delays, weak spots, strong spots etc; giving marks, scores, penalizing the 
student; expressing some feelings (satisfaction,  dissatisfaction, sadness, happiness, 
hope, fear etc.). We considered necessary to design original affective agent 
architecture (Be SGOTE) that allows feelings to be expressed.  
Sometimes showing some statistic data is not the best way of feedback that can be 
given to a person who learns something and solves some problems. It is 
recommended that after asking simple questions or after short periods of testing the 
teachers should show their attitudes towards the student’s results through verbal ways 
or even through their mimic and gestures. These ways can show the satisfaction or 
dissatisfaction towards the student’s results or hope and fear for reaching or not 
reaching the initial goals. 
The agent for grading the student should express feelings or emotions and the 
feelings can differ from one agent to another the way they differ from one teacher to 
another depending on the teacher’s temperament. The coordinator agent plays a 
8Statistics regarding the 
situation of the student 
Human-like agent 
6      Bogdan Pătruţ1, 
fundamental role in the well working of the s-agent of which it is part of, because it 
gives the control to each of the other agents and, besides this, it holds the 
communication with the other agents. The coordinator agent also deals with solving 
the special events, such as the sudden break of the running application, a special error 
etc. After presenting the structure of each agent from an s-agent, we show the way in 
which an s-agent works (see Figure 1). 
In the theory of intelligent software agents there are a lot of architectures like the 
BDI (Beliefs, Desires, Intentions), the architectures with layers or the architectures 
coming from logic ([6]).  
The Rao and Georgeff's BDI architecture is considered one of the best, because it 
is very natural and many concrete software agents use it. On the other hand, this 
architecture ([4]) presents some deficiencies, because no kind of temperamental 
characteristics are implemented in it. So, in the same situation, two BDI agents will 
have the same behaviour. We know that in the real world this assumption can not be 
true.  
The human beings are influenced by their temperament, which can make the 
agent to express its emotions. 
We will present a type of architecture for intelligent agents that are able to 
express emotions, even to show its temperament. It is an extension of the classic BDI 
architecture. The basic concepts of this architecture are: Beliefs, States, Goals, 
Temperament and Emotions 
 
We made a pedagogical experiment at the University of Bacău, involving 100 
students. The experiment has proven the efficiency of using the ContTest program for 
didactic purpose. The students were divided in two equal groups; first group followed 
the traditional education (with a real teacher) and the second was assisted by 
ContTest. In the exams session, all students were examinated by a real professor. 
Their results (on a scale from 1 – minimum to 10 – maximum) can be seen in figure 8. 
There are some parts in which the ContTest system can be improved by:  
• generalizing the agent for providing the tests in such a way as this agent 
should be able to also provide other kinds of problems, in Romanian and 
following different models; 
• generalizing the agent for checking the answers in the way of adapting it 
to the new variants of the problems; 
• improving the agent for exemplification in order to allow the generating 
of more examples;  
• adjusting the system to a distributed work environment (intranet, 
Internet). 
Based on the instant achievements and on the possibilities of improvement, we 
can conclude that the ContTest system detains a structure fit for interactive 
accounting learning.  
Education in Accounting using an Interactive System      7 
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Traditional
ContTest
 
Fig. 8 Results obtained by the two groups of students both with traditional and ContTest 
method 
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Education in Accounting using an Interactive System

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Education in Accounting using an Interactive System

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