A Proposal: The Use of an Integrated Learning System in Intermediate Accounting

Ask any accounting major and he or she will agree that intermediate accounting is hard! In fact, it is probably considered one of the hardest courses an accounting major has to take. What makes it so difficult? For most... [ view full abstract ]

Ask any accounting major and he or she will agree that intermediate accounting is hard! In fact, it is probably considered one of the hardest courses an accounting major has to take. What makes it so difficult? For most students, it is the large number of complicated topics that must be covered in intermediate accounting. In addition, for many students, their foundation of introductory accounting is very weak. They don’t remember the basic concepts of accounting learned previously so they are not ready for the complexity of intermediate accounting. This is not an unusual situation—most instructors of intermediate accounting complain about the lack of knowledge of basic accounting concepts that students have. Even intermediate textbooks take this into account and include several chapters designed to review the basic accounting cycle, the balance sheet and the income statement. Unfortunately, the level of knowledge about basic accounting is not consistent across all students. Some students remember very little while others, in the same class, may pick up on the topics quickly. This disparity makes it difficult for an instructor to plan how to teach. This study discusses one approach to reducing the difficulty in teaching students with different skill levels: an integrated learning system.