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.