The Accounting Educator

The Newsletter of the Teaching and Curriculum Section
American Accounting Association
Vol. XI No. 1 - Winter 2002

Midyear Committee Reports

Assessment Committee
The Committee's charge is to determine best practice criteria for assessing the learning outcomes of accounting programs, identify best practices among accounting programs, and prepare a publishable report that documents our work. We had a productive meeting at the National AAA meeting in which we outlined the following four-phase process for executing our charge.

1. Briefly define outcomes assessment, review the literature, and prepare a list of guidelines for effective assessment practices derived from the literature. We will use that list as "best practices criteria (BPC)." The literature review will be very concise (a well organized annotated bibliography) and focus on letting the audience know about the resources that are available.

The literature review is almost complete. We are in the process of writing up what we have learned.

2. Based on the BPC, we will survey program chairs at US universities and colleges to learn the extent to which departments satisfy the BPC. Data from this survey will be used to identify roughly eight best practices schools (BPS). We have designed and built a web survey instrument, which was e-mailed to accounting program chairs early in December, 2000. Jim Hasselback supplied the database of accounting program chairs.

3. We will obtain detailed information about assessment programs at BPS, and use a common format to document the assessment programs at these schools. This phase will begin after we receive responses from program chairs.

4. We will also review the AACSB accreditation reports of newly (within the last three years) accredited or reaffirmed accounting programs and document, using a consistent format, the assessment programs used by these schools. This phase is in progress.

Our documentation in 3 and 4 will focus on and include sections on each of the following:

a. What is the school's mission?
b. How is assessment defined?
c. What activities are included in the assessment program?
d. What is measured and how?
e. How is assessment data stored and retrieved?
f. In what format, how frequently, and to whom are assessment data reported?
g. Are assessment data formally discussed by the faculty and/or administrators?
h. Is there evidence that the program uses assessment data to effect/motivate meaningful change and improvement in program?
i. Who has responsibility for the assessment program?

We will consider the following four AAA assessment projects:

1) Monograph
2) Booklet on assessment
3) Benchmarking
4) Tracey Sutherland - Web site on assessment

We will also consider work being done by Dick Baker and the APLG. The output of our project will be a monograph to be published by the T&C section.

The following is a list of Committee members:

• Paul Bayes - East Tennessee State University (Present at meeting)
• Leslie Kren - U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (Could not make it to Atlanta)
• Mark Mitschow - SUNY-Geneseo (Could not make it to Atlanta)
• Lynda Murray-Jackson - Delaware State University (Present at meeting)
• Kathleen Sinning - Western Michigan University (did not receive any e-mail correspondence about the meeting)
• Terry Ward - Middle Tennessee State University (did not receive any e-mail correspondence about the meeting)
• Mike Harkness - U of Michigan - Dearborn (Present at meeting)
• Brian Patrick Green - U of Michigan - Dearborn (Present at meeting)
• Thomas Calderon - U of Akron (Present at meeting)

Thomas Calderon, Brian Green, and Mike Harkness took the initial lead roles in phases 1 and 2, which are prerequisites for phase 3. After we have completed phases 1 and 2, we will work with the rest of the Committee to contact and document assessment programs at BPS. Most committee members have helped with reviewing and commenting on work in progress, particularly the online survey instrument.

Paul Bayes and Lynda Murray Jackson are initially coordinating phase 4 of the project and will receive direct support from Terry, Mark, Leslie, and Kathleen.

Shared Experiences Committee
Our committee met on Tuesday, August 14 in Atlanta, Georgia during the AAA annual meeting. We reached the following conclusions:

• We need to make an effort to attract younger faculty to hear our panels. As a result, we decided to begin an initiative to market to new faculty and PhD students.
• We should investigate the possibility of establishing a mentoring hotline and/or a chat room consistent with our mission.
• Whenever possible, a plenary session should be obtained at regional meetings of the AAA.
• As soon as a regional panel has been established, the appropriate committee member should enlist a Teaching and Curriculum section regional director for that region. Such individuals are supposed to work with us on making our T&C sponsored session more effective. Such individuals might, for example, help us find distinguished senior faculty panelists and promote our session so that we are able to attract more attendees.

Our committee also allocated panel submissions to each member. Thus far, here are our submissions:

Regional Meetings (remaining decisions should be made within the next few weeks):

• Midwest Region: Jerry Weinstein
• Northeast Region: Paul Solomon We have received a tentative approval.
• MidAtlantic Region: Don Wygal We have received a tentative approval.
• Southwest Region: Mary Fisher
• Southeast Region: Mike Bitter
• Ohio Region: Since a plenary session was obtained in 2001, we decided to place our energies on other conferences.
• Western Region: Paul Solomon We have received a tentative approval.

Annual Meeting (San Antonio - August 2002): Chuck Carpenter

Other Organizations:
We also agreed it was important to find outlets for our panels for other than AAA regional meetings, the annual AAA meeting, and the Colloquium. As a result, committee members have already contacted the Doctoral Consortium (no interest), the New Faculty Consortium (interested but February 2002 program had been set last summer), and the Auditing Section (their program was set before we made our proposal). We are also in the process of contacting the APLG, GNP, the PhD project, and the TACTYC organizations to see if they have an interest.

Innovations in Accounting Committee
The Innovations in Accounting Education Committee consists of the following members:

• D'Arcy Becker, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
• Larry Crumbley, Louisiana State University
• Donna Dietz, North Dakota State University
• Bart Hartman, St. Joseph's University
• Carol Normand, Eastern Illinois University
• Mark Rubin, Miami University
• Catherine Usoff, Bentley College

The committee held an organizational meeting at the national AAA conference in Atlanta in August 2001. Since then we have established a website for committee work which is hosted by Bentley College. We are currently focusing on identifying potential innovations by reviewing the regional meeting programs from 2001. We are also contacting several representatives from various AAA committees to whom innovations may have been submitted in conjunction with education committees or innovation award committees. The committee is specifically targeting innovations in upper division courses in tax, cost, intermediate, advanced, AIS, auditing, and governmental accounting. I have spoken to the webmaster for the T and C committee and will continue to speak with her about putting our findings on the website.

Introductory Accounting
Our committee is in the process of reviewing a survey we developed for distance learning in the 1st year accounting courses. This survey will be sent to accounting chairs of all 4-year and 2-year colleges-most by electronic survey, some by regular mail. We anticipate this survey going out in early to mid February and hope to have results in time for the August AAA meeting.

International Committee—no report received as yet

Pedagogy Committee
The charge of our committee this year is as follows:

Survey accounting administrators to determine how their accounting units have considered the AICPA Core Competencies in developing their pedagogical approaches to their classroom instruction. Based on the initial survey contact individuals for in-depth discussions of their approaches to determine some best practices and make them available to section members.

The Pedagogy Committee met initially during the AAA meeting and discussed plans for the upcoming year. Since then, we have established an approach to our research project and have begun work. Attached is a working draft of the questionnaire that we plan to send via email to accounting administrators. (Chair's note: In the interest of brevity, I did not include this). We decided not to restrict our questions to the set of competencies defined in the AICPA Core Competency Framework. We will ask administrators about the source(s) used by accounting programs to generate educational objectives, including the AICPA Core Competency Framework as well as other sources. This approach will allow us to learn more about pedagogical changes made by departments in their efforts to enhance students' skills, competencies and abilities.

Following is our estimated timeline for the remainder of the year:

Premeeting Committee
The Pre-meeting subcommittee has several suggestions for programs for this year's AAA meeting:

1. Student Recruitment: Dan Deines will work with Bea Sanders, Jodi Ryan, and Joe Bittner to present something along with him on recruiting students into the accounting profession. The AICPA has committed $25 million for recruitment efforts. These recruitment efforts should be of interest to the AAA members.

2. Assessment: Susan Wolcott has suggested three areas of assessment we might be interested in:
TEACHING AND ASSESSING LIFE-LONG LEARNING SKILLS
This workshop would focus on exploring what we mean by life-long learning and then practicing evaluating student papers to assess life-long learning skills.

ASSESSING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
This workshop would be similar to the one above, but would focus on critical thinking. In addition, this workshop would include a brief survey of alternative critical thinking assessment instruments (which are rarely appropriate for the types of skills professors view as critical thinking).

USING STUDENT COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENTS IN A PROGRAM ASSESSMENT PLAN This workshop would introduce an assessment method, have participants practice assessing student papers, and then discuss how this type of assessment information could be used in a program assessment plan.

We also thought an update on accounting research from David Stout would be a valuable addition to the program. Although, he is unable to do such a session this year, he has volunteered for next year and made the following suggestion that we recommend be passed on to next year's committee:

I would like to volunteer to do something for the following year's meeting, so you might want to pass this information on to the appropriate person (which might be yourself). Jim Rebele and I are doing a comprehensive analysis of reasons why manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Accounting Education and Issues in Accounting Education get rejected. I have slightly over 300 files to be analyzed; Jim has approximately 100. We have established a framework for analysis that includes 32 "reasons" (grouped into 7 categories). We will generate results for three types of submissions: (1) research (i.e., non-instructional resource) papers rejected upon initial submission, (2) research papers rejected upon resumbission, and (3) instructional resource paper (largely, case submissions). For each rejected paper we provide up to three "primary" and three "secondary" reasons. Based on the analyses we perform, we intend to offer specific advice to authors/aspiring authors. I would be willing to do a half-day CPE workshop prior to next year's meeting.

Research Committee
I have been working with some of the committee members to get things movingalong. Here is the status of what we have done and are committed to doing.

1. I just submitted four articles for the Have You Seen column in the Section's newsletter. More will be forthcoming for the next newsletter.
2. Art Murtuzat has committed to preparing a draft of a manuscript that will discuss using Engligh teaching philosophies in accounting assignments. I do not want to commit to specifics at this time. Art indicated that we will get a draft of the document in Jan.
3. Loren Wenzell and Leslee Higgins have committed to working on a literature summarization of research on classroom evaluations and on promotion criteria, respectively. I believe both of these summarizations can help some section members generate research ideas.

I have tried to call Mike Brown, David Collins, and Susan Koch and have not been successful at reaching them. I will contact them via email and ask them to contribute to the Have You Seen column for the next newsletter.

Service Learning Committee— no report as yet.

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