Enhancing the Link between Technology and Accounting in Introductory Courses: Evidence from Students
INTRODUCTIONMany accounting programs emphasize the use of Excel in their undergraduate business curriculum in response to demands by the accounting profession for tech savvy graduates capable of manipulating complex spreadsheets. Cory and Pruske [2012] and Rassulu et al. [2012] both report that proficiency in Excel is highly ranked by employers as a desirable skill among new graduates, but Yu, Churyk et al. [2013] find that employers often deem accounting graduates' spreadsheets skills as inadequate. In a pilot program at La Salle University, we experimented for two years with a "double" course format in which we formally linked our Introductory Computer Science course with our Introduction to Financial Accounting course (i.e. students attended both courses as a cohort group and faculty in both sections directly interacted to link technology and accounting assignments) We designed the "double" in an attempt to better prepare our students for professional employment in the business field by emphasizing the natural interdependence of accounting and technology more concretely in the classroom.The purpose of this paper is to report our findings regarding the effectiveness of our linked1 design. Specifically, we surveyed all students enrolled in our freshmen Introduction to Financial Accounting sections to see whether the linked design more effectively emphasized technology skills deemed necessary for success in business. We also investigated whether the linked design influenced students' perceptions regarding the role of technology in accounting. While formal linked designs such as the one reported here may not be feasible in all business curricula, our findings suggest numerous advantages to more explicitly linking technology and introductory accounting courses. Our paper is organized as follows: first, we review pedagogical literature regarding linked course designs. Next we discuss the specifics of our double format. Our survey methodology and results follow. The paper ends with a discussion of the benefits of linking technology and accounting, while offering some concluding remarks and future suggestions based on our survey results.LITERATURE REVIEWOver the past two decades, numerous studies call for accounting and business education programs to be more relevant and cross disciplinary [Nelson et al. 1998; Albrecht Sack, 2000; Stout West, 2004; Stout et al. 2005] so as to provide students with a better understanding of how business disciplines are interrelated in the real world [Leauby Wentzel, 2007, 2012] Many business programs, however, still follow a silo approach where each discipline and course stands on its own with minimal discussion or linkages to other disciplines in the business school, very unlike what happens in practice. Such silo approaches ignore the interrelationships between disciplines that occur in the real world [Stover et al. 1997].At La Salle University we strive to offer integrated or linked courses in the School of Business. For instance, we currently teach Introduction to Managerial Accounting and Fundamentals of Financial Management in a linked format and have been doing so for over ten years [see Leauby and Wentzel, 2007, 2012] In the Management Accounting Finance duo, students learn to interpret the same information from different perspectives through the use of common cases and examples which help illustrate the natural link between accounting and finance. Similar to the innate link between Managerial Accounting and Financial Management, interdependencies exist between Financial Accounting and Information Technology. One of the most important learning goals in an introductory financial accounting course is to understand the relationship amongst the primary financial statements, as well as to perform basic financial analysis. Since Excel is the primary tool used by accounting professionals to sort and analyze financial data, and since Excel is covered in introductory computer science courses, we chose to strengthen these connections by formally linking Introductory Computer Science with Introduction to Financial Accounting to better demonstrate these interdependencies to our freshmen students.