Dr. Leslie Pearlman
Harvard University
John F. Kennedy School of Government
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-496-0811
Fax: 617-496-2860
Leslie_Pearlman@harvard.edu
The use of CD-ROM and/or online links to the learning of financial accounting accomplishes several goals at the same time. First and most obvious, the student is gaining knowledge about the foundation of financial statements and financial accounting. Second, the student must be familiar enough with the use of a computer and for some, how to access information online, that when the use of the computer is required later in the course, it is not foreign to any of them. Further, the immediate feedback that students receive in response to their "choices" about answering questions, after reading initial material, furthers and solidifies the learning process. The student cannot "look ahead" or cheat him/herself in learning the material. The reading must be done prior to responding to questions. If the student chooses the incorrect answer, he/she must reread the material and eventually choose the correct answer before moving on.
This very introductory approach to the learning of financial accounting is often tedious and dull for students. The innovative feedback loops of Essentials of Accounting eliminates some of this boredom for the students and solves some of the computer issues for the instructor. Although the use of spreadsheets involves further learning, the student loses some of the inherent resistance to this after completing the initial coursework with the use of the computer. The online and CD-ROM versions of this teaching material lend well to the integration of web-based course pages for remedial questions and "distance learning" processes.
As indicated above, the learner is forced to "deal with" the computer from the very beginning of the course. The incorporation of spreadsheet assignments and other computer work into an accounting course is facilitated if the initial assignments require student involvement with the computer. A final and perhaps most important benefit is the immediate feedback in the learning process to the student and the need to stay with the problems until the correct solution is reached.
Since the material that my students use is very basic and introductory, I can only say that the flexibility of students having to deal with the computer from the first day lessens any anxiety they may have about the role that technology will play. When I ask them to learn the use of spreadsheet analysis, there is MUCH less resistance to doing so. Further, when I incorporated the use of web-based course pages to reduce the amount of paper distributed in a classroom, again there was little resistance to simply adapting to that process. As the material I teach is available both in book and software form, and because I give students the choice of which they use to learn this material, they feel that their individual learning styles are taken into consideration by me from the very beginning of the learning experience.
Forthcoming