Presenters:
A. Faye Borthick, Georgia State University
Carol W. Springer, Georgia State University
Description:
This session offers an approach for helping students expand their learning repertoire from only building archival memory to preparing for situated action in accounting practice. Students receive a narrative with links to supporting materials and an Excel® spreadsheet or an Access® database containing data and relationships representing a business situation. The students’ task is to make sense of the situation, analyze the data to detect patterns germane to the situation, and make recommendations for solving business problems or taking advantage of business opportunities. As in accounting practice, nuances of the situation emerge as students form hypotheses about the problems or opportunities and validate or discard them based on the enacted practices represented in the data. Although these projects can be completed individually or in groups, group completion has the advantage of setting up circumstances in which students confront each other with conflicting perspectives, which they must resolve. Participants will: (1) learn how to shape learning outcomes for this approach, (2) consider a process for developing narratives and enabling data, (3) be made aware of difficulties associated with the approach, and (4) get access to implementations for introductory accounting, cost accounting, and information systems.
