100+ Years Teaching Financial and Intermediate Accounting Suggestions for Change
Robert P. Derstine, James M. Emig & Kevin E. Flynn
Abstract
In today’s educational environment, many students have grown accustomed to memorizing their textbook and class notes. The students then parrot back the material when taking an exam. Their goal is not to learn, but rather to get a good grade. In this paper, we show examples and illustrations of how we teach financial accounting in a manner so that students learn and become adaptive problem solvers, not human parrots. We show how we simplify accounting presentations so that students more easily learn the concepts being taught. The goal is to get students to understand what they are doing so that they are not blindly following instructions in the text. Specifically, we show how we: 1.) Expose our students to some of the controversial items facing the accounting/business world in a rapidly changing environment, 2.) Stress the “Whys” – not simply the “Hows”, and 3.) State when and why we don’t always agree with the textbook.