American Accounting Association 2006 Midwest Region Meeting March 30 – April 1 Chicago, Illinois

Friday, March 31, 10:20 a.m.-12:00 noon
Concurrent session 2F - Curriculum and Assessment Issues (Teaching and Curriculum)

Title: Factors Associated with Students’ Performance in Advanced Accounting and Auditing: An Empirical Study in a Public University

Ring Chen Northeastern Illinois University	Lin Zheng Northeastern Illinois University
Mostafa M. Maksy Northeastern Illinois University

ABSTRACT: A great number of studies have explored various factors that are associated with student performance in college-level accounting courses. While it is widely believed that motivation and effort significantly influence individual performance in college, few studies have investigated their impact in accounting education. Some studies have explored the association between effort and performance in the area of finance; however the results are either inconclusive or present contra-intuitive evidence that the more time spent studying per week the lower the grade students would receive in the introductory finance course.

An extensive review of the literature indicates that no prior study has considered the association between motivation, prior actual ability, current self-perceived ability, and confidence factors and students’ performance in accounting courses beyond the intermediate level. The objective of the current study is to fill this gap in research. The current study considers the association between the above four factors and students’ performance in Advanced Accounting, and Auditing courses.

The university in which we conducted this study is a highly diversified, commuter, public university located in one of the largest cities in the United Sates. Questionnaires covering the components of the four factors that we hypothesize are associated with students’ performance, as well as questions related to students’ demographic and other information were distributed to classes of upper-level accounting courses during the Spring, Summer, and Fall semesters of 2004. A total of 98 useful responses were collected.

We use a variety of factors (the grade the student would like to make in the course, self-classified motivation toward learning, student’s learning preferences, reasons for going to college, planning to take the CPA examination, or attend graduate school) as proxy for motivation. We use students’ grades in Intermediate Accounting I and II as well as their grade point average (GPA) in foundation courses and their cumulative GPA as proxy for prior actual ability factors. We use the students’ self-reported feelings about their writing, math, reading, and listening abilities as the self-perceived ability factors. We use the type of job and the number of weekly hours of work outside the school, as well as the number of courses taken per semester as proxy for confidence factors. Using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson, and Spearman correlation statistical tests, the study shows that all of the actual ability factors, and some of the motivation, and self-perceived ability factors are significantly associated with students’ performance in advanced accounting and auditing courses. However, confidence factors have positive but not significant association with students’ performance in these two courses.

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