Mohammad J. Abdolmohammadi
Bentley College
Abstract: The case-based pedagogy has been the dominant method used in ethics intervention courses. In this study, I provide evidence on whether this method succeeds in improving ethical reasoning of a sample of graduate accounting students. Specifically, three weeks out of a 14-week case-based capstone research course in a Master of Science degree in Accountancy was used to cover individual ethics, professional ethics, business ethics, and the case approach to discussing ethical dilemmas. In addition, ethical issues were considered throughout the semester when cases on various accounting topics were discussed. By administering the Defining Issues Test (DIT) at the beginning and the end of the semester, I documented the changes in studentsÂ’ ethical reasoning as measured by the DIT P-score. Overall, the intervention resulted in statistically significant gains in the P-score. However, while the effect size was very low and even slightly negative for large sections, it was moderate to high for small sections. In addition, analysis by gender indicated that there were no significant differences between females and males at the beginning or the end of the semester, but while the gain in the P-score was statistically significant for male students, it was insignificant for the females. Implications of the results are discussed.
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