Learning from collaborative explanations in accounting education

Abstract

Rooted in social constructivism, this thesis aims to support accounting educators in transitioning from traditional rote learning approaches to more dynamic educational approaches which broaden accounting competency development. To achieve this, this thesis introduces the use of student-led team-teaching tasks, which incorporate learning-byexplaining, through various modes (oral, video and written), to develop accounting students’ conceptual and transfer knowledge, while simultaneously developing their teamwork and communication skills within a competency-based accounting education setting. The findings indicate that student-led team-teaching tasks, which incorporate learning-byexplaining, played a beneficial role in providing accounting students with opportunities for broader competency development. These tasks not only supported accounting students’ knowledge development but also created opportunities for the development of teamwork and communication skills. In particular, the findings of this thesis indicate that weak and moderate-performing accounting students obtain comparable conceptual knowledge development benefits from all three modes (oral, video, and written) of the student-led team-teaching tasks. However, top-performing accounting students only benefited from the video mode, with decreases in conceptual knowledge observed from the oral and written modes. The mode of the explanation, therefore, played a role in the conceptual knowledge development benefits experienced by the top-performing students of this thesis. - i - In terms of transfer knowledge, all students, regardless of prior-performance level, experienced comparable development benefits from all three explanation modes. Therefore, the mode of the explanation did not influence the transfer knowledge development benefits from the student-led team-teaching tasks. In terms of opportunities for teamwork and communication skills development from the student-led team-teaching tasks, incorporating learning-by-explaining, accounting students more frequently reported opportunities for teamwork skills development than for communication skills development. This trend was consistent across all task modes (oral, video and written). When focusing solely on teamwork skills development, the mode of explanations appeared to play a role, with the video explanation mode being perceived as the most beneficial for creating opportunities for teamwork skills development. However, the mode did not appear to influence the development of communication skills, as all three modes were reported to provide comparable benefits for communication skills development. In conclusion, this thesis offers accounting educators an exemplar task, the student-led team-teaching task, which facilitates broader competency development for accounting students. The thesis also contributes new insights to the literature on competency-based education, team-teaching, learning-by-explaining, and accounting education.