METHODOLOGICAL ADAPTATION TO THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA (EHEA) IN ACCOUNTING SUBJECTS. A PRELIMINARY STUDY

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) promotes student-centred teaching in which students assume the responsibility for the organization and development of their academic work, hence the need to employ active methodologies and to shift from those based on behavioural learning towards methodologies which promote constructivist learning.

We present the results of the study undertaken during the 2008-09 academic year during the introduction of the two active participation methodologies: Project Based Learning (ABPrj) and Activity Based Learning (ABA), evaluating their usefulness in accordance with the academic performance of participants in comparison with those who did not take part. Both these working methods share concepts with a number of procedures defined in the literature, referred to as actual or devised case studies and project-based learning. ABPrj involves studying the subject in question by means of real information drawn from a company, while ABA involves choosing and resolving a practical case study devised by the subject tutors and directly prepared for the students' learning experience.

The differences between the two methodologies are to be found in the temporal aspect of their application and in their emphasis. While ABA is a short-term (one week) approach, ABPrj is long-term (one term of four months); whereas the former places the emphasis on the contrasting of opinions, the second stresses the design and development of a group working plan.

ABPrj was used on the teaching programmes for the subjects Financial Accounting III (CF III) and Accounting Analysis (AC) in the 4th year of the Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration at the University of Seville. These two subject developed on the basis of actual information (financial statements) generated by companies. The aim in CF III is that students should not only become familiar with the design or content of these financial statements, but that through the application of ABPrj students will deal with how they are actually drawn up. For the AC subject, students use actual information obtained from an organisation (financial statements and other supplementary data) to perform the entire process of evaluating its economic and financial situation.

ABPrj was implemented in the CF III subject on a purely voluntary basis, tutored by 4 faculty members. 31 groups were formed and 25 companies analysed, freely chosen by the groups. In AC there was both voluntary ABPrj and ABA for all those students not taking part in ABPrj, with tutoring provided by 6 faculty staff.

The results are presented by way of comparison: this measures the usefulness and performance of ABPrj in each subject and measures the usefulness and performance of ABA in AC.

The following were employed in assessing the results:
-An opinion survey about ABPrj in CF III and AC, and ABA in AC.
-The grades obtained in the final exam in each subject.

The results highlight how the use of active participation methodologies has a significant impact on the performance of students, setting them considerably apart from those students not following these methods. The results of the study nonetheless confirm that success is closely tied to the type of subject involved: in our case, CF III is an instrumental and regulatory subject, whereas AC is more creative, tied to an overall vision and intellectual stimulation, hence the fact that ABPrj is better suited to the profile of AC than to CF III.