Abstract:

This research project aims to gain an insight into the personal lived experiences of students with the phenomenon of double entry accounting. For years accounting educators have debated the usefulness of their teaching endeavour with accounting concepts. Many students I struggle with the first accounting concept of double entry. The goal of this short piece of research is to categorise how students tackled double entry problems before and after the introduction of guided templates to aid their learning. This will be achieved through first, reviewing and categorizing trends observed in student’s responses to double entry questions in their first formal examination of the subject across three academic years. The results show that an average of 61% of students gave incorrect answers across all years reviewed. These incorrect answers were grouped into a range of “error type” categories to demonstrate students level of understanding. The overall finding was that students appeared to be applying surface or memorisation-type approaches to solve these questions, which is less successful when the problems become more complex. During the fourth academic year, the Author introduced guided templates to aid students in learning the process of determining a double entry to a transaction. The same analysis was conducted post their first formal examination and revealed that the average number of incorrect answers had dropped from 61% to 49%. Interestingly, there was also a significant shift across the “error type” categories. The results showed that while some students were getting the answers incorrect, they were in a better position to attempt the questions compared with before. While there were improvements, students are still using surface or memorisation-type approaches to solve these questions. The broad implication for accounting lectures is to consider existing teaching-learning environments and how they might be re-designed to encourage deeper approaches to learning. Using guided templates has certainly helped to shift students away from the surface approach. Although out of the scope of this research, the motivation to this short study is to help situate the author on the right path for ultimately determining the root cause of the problems her class groups are having with learning double entry accounting.

Keywords:

Double Entry, Accounting Education, Learning Approaches, Document Analysis, Phenomenograhic Research, Guided Research.