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

Saturday, April 1, 11:00 a.m. to 12:50 p.m.
Concurrent session 6C - Classroom Exercises (Teaching and Curriculum)

Title: Creating In-Class Mastery Exercises Using Excel’s Conditional Formatting

David L. Johnson University of St. Thomas

ABSTRACT: Students need practice doing exercises and receiving feedback in class. However, it is very difficult to provide students with individual feedback in a classroom. As a result, I developed a set of Excel spreadsheets that I call Mastery Exercises for my Financial Accounting course. These spreadsheets allow students to practice the material that I have presented in class.

I hold my class in a computer lab, with a computer for each student. The spreadsheet provides students with feedback for each cell indicating whether their answer is right or wrong. When they enter a number in a cell, it turns green if correct and red if incorrect. While they work on the exercises, students can work together and obtain help from each other or they can raise their hands and I will come over and help them out. This provides an opportunity for students to work at their own pace and receive individual feedback.

In this paper I provide the step-by-step process to construct spreadsheets such as these using conditional formatting.

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