Essays on Changing Accounting Education

Edited by Charles P. Baril, Bradley M. Roof

288 pages, copyright 1994

The mid-1980s inaugurated a period of self-examination for accounting education; a period continuing today in which accounting education and its constituents are thoroughly evaluating every aspect of the discipline.

This book is a collection of 21 recently published essays addressing many issues on changes in accounting education. The purpose of the book is to bring together quality publications on accounting education change and to reveal the fundamental structure that this change process is assuming.

• Changing Perspectives on Accounting Education: The opening article echoes the call of the American Accounting Association Bedford Committee for more broadly and capably educated accountants. The following three papers in varying ways address the need to refocus accounting education as an information process which enables more effective decision making.
• Changing the Industry of Accounting Education: These papers collectively advocate basic changes in the industrial organization of accounting education delivery which will make accounting more useful and relevant to a rapidly changing world. A redefinition of scholarship, revisions in accredidation, and the use of specific legislation to nurture broader accounting education constitute the focus of this section's first three papers. The last paper takes a hard look at the initial years of this period of change in accounting education.
• Changing Accounting Programs: This section includes articles addressing changes or ways of changing accounting programs. The initial paper summarizes 25 years of change and compares that change to the current impetus for change. The second and third papers deal with the value of enhancing independent learning and the use of a systems approach in developing program changes. The last paper asserts that sweeping changes in the elementary accounting curriculum will attract better students to accounting and will better educate them.
• Changing Accounting Instruction: The final papers in this volume address improving accounting instruction and broadening student skills through pedagogical improvements which could be incorporated in a specific course or more broadly throughout the curriculum. Integrating ethics into course work, using the case method, improving student social and interpersonal skills and enhancing realism in course work are the topics which encompass the last seven papers of this volume.