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4.6 Teaching for Learning
In the list below, we summarize key recommendations made in this chapter. We hope that accounting faculty will find these useful in implementing the new goals of accounting education.TEACHING FOR LEARNING
Activities for Accounting Education
- Include learning goals as well as accounting content goals in the curriculum and in each course.
- Discuss the learning process and learning to learn strategies and attributes to make students conscious of these goals. Teach students to verbalize what they are doing and why they are doing it.
- Teach students the attributes of intentional learning:
- Questions to ask about new accounting material and about their learning experience.
- Strategies for organizing new knowledge such as outlining, concept mapping, and diagraming.
- Methods for making connections between new information and their own experience and previous knowledge.
- Techniques for reflecting on what and how they are learning, such as journal writing, short papers, group discussion of learning exercises.
- Strategies for adapting knowledge to different, real-world situations, and for expanding their vision and understanding beyond course work.
- Use a variety of teaching strategies and roles to involve students actively in their learning; focus the course on student learning rather than on professor teaching.
- Assign problem-solving and critical thinking exercises which include:
- Defining the problem.
- Assessing available information.
- Identifying assumptions.
- Examining potential solutions and their possible consequences.
- Adopting and evaluating a solution.
- Expect students to write often and well in all of their accounting courses and require them to write for a specific accounting-related audience.
- Create a classroom environment which provides an open and continuous opportunity to discuss both accounting subjects and the learning process. Reduce the fear of being wrong or the fear of dealing with the unfamiliar.
- Encourage positive student peer group attitudes toward learning and develop peer support systems.
- Give students plenty of practice in thinking about and doing both learning and accounting.
- Evaluate student learning processes as well as the accounting content learned.