financial accounting tutor

financial accounting tutor

The Role of Financial Accounting Tutors in Enhancing Student Learning

1. Introduction to Financial Accounting Tutoring

Financial accounting is a basic course for all students studying accounting. This means that a large number of students, including management, marketing, and business education students, need to study introductory financial accounting. This situation presents an additional challenge to faculty teaching the course. If accounting programs are to remain viable, accounting courses need to accommodate students who have a variety of educational goals. Financial accounting instructors need to be aware of these diverse needs. One possible solution is more personalized instruction. This paper reports on the results of a study which investigates the role of financial accounting tutors. The results of the study show how this role can be used to develop student learning and to achieve student satisfaction with financial accounting tutoring.

As the accounting profession becomes more complex, employers of accounting graduates are expressing their concerns through the media about the quality of graduates they are hiring and the opinions they are passing on to lenders and investors. There is increased demand for accounting graduates but this demand is often difficult to meet. Employers are interested in students who have the specialized skills and knowledge required for career success. To meet the information-processing needs of the accounting profession, accounting educators are continually updating the content and delivery of accounting courses. Due to the increasing number of subjects which students are expected to study, accounting programs are moving toward providing more flexible curricula.

2. Benefits of Financial Accounting Tutoring

Tutoring, as it has come to be described, has been and remains an area of considerable importance within the educational process, particularly within the university, and most particularly on programs leading to a professional qualification. To some, it lies at the heart of the tutorial system, and to all, it plays an increasing role in providing students with the opportunity to become scholars in their own right and the opportunity to put into practice the critical and creative thinking qualities so often emphasized in the documentation of academic goals. It is not uncommon to find faculty information on the significance of the tutor or advisor, who, in addition to playing the role of the tutor in the traditional sense, also plays a role as a mentor to the students and a role as an evaluator of student performance. Within the field of accounting education, there has been an increasing interest in particular, to students’ earnings and inexperience.

The financial accounting tutor liaises between two important constituents of the university: the students and the university. They play various roles as a tutor, assessor, and advisor. Tutorial teaching, as practiced today, has three potential functions: to identify different levels of knowledge about a particular subject, to enable all students to progress faster than would be possible through lecture or self-instruction alone, and to create a greater sense of academic closeness, support, and assistance for students. In their role as contributors to the assessment process, tutors have a number of responsibilities. They design tutorial activities to ensure that they gain a comprehensive understanding of student learning and also to ensure that the assessment process matches the learning outcomes set for the course. They also have responsibilities to the outcomes of the assessment process. These include organizing appropriate feedback on students’ performance and recording and evaluating outcomes.

The role of financial accounting tutors in enhancing student learning – benefits of financial accounting tutoring

3. Effective Strategies for Financial Accounting Tutors

It is essential for instructors and tutors to have an understanding of student learning behavior. Accounting students are considered to be pragmatic learners as they learn best through case-based and skill-based training. Empirical evidence suggests that simply tutoring the same coverage material in large or small groups will not result in different learning outcomes. Furthermore, students perceive tutoring as most beneficial when it assists with learning difficult material or with unique material. Students prefer tutoring in difficult areas for in-depth material understanding. It is important to align the effectiveness of tutoring with cognitive learning and performance. The current empirical investigation used a “content expert” approach.

Tutoring creates a reinforcing support to students. This study has identified a need for effective financial accounting tutoring that not only improves students’ basic financial accounting skills, but also cognitive outcomes such as analytical and critical thinking. While many papers have studied the effectiveness of student tutors or tutor training, fewer studies have identified effective strategies for tutors. The latter are often based on practical experience. Furthermore, practical assistance to tutors that clearly lays out suggested forms of teaching has been identified as beneficial for accounting tutors.

4. Challenges and Solutions in Financial Accounting Tutoring

Financial accounting is typically taught by university faculties from three main disciplines of accountancy, finance, and law. As such, it has a wider perspective integrating legal, economic, social, green, stakeholder, and competitive issues in the business environment. This view suggests any changes to educational resources, methods, distribution, and its supporting technologies should reflect the mix of skills and knowledge-based education of a broad-based curriculum. A broader education such as this marks a contrast between tertiary accounting institutions that offer accounting or banking and finance-only courses of study from those that offer broader and more general business program offerings.

In considering the challenges of tutoring in financial accounting, the approach should also take into consideration the unique context or setting of the business and commerce community and of different tertiary institutions. This is crucial as most financing accounting instruction occurs within a business and commerce curriculum offered by universities, and the role of tutors will be tailored largely by the faculty in line with the targets of the Bachelor of Commerce program to the end of building professional accountancy capability for students. To make the context even clearer, the degree program typically combines training in accounting, finance, and advanced knowledge in tax and commercial law.

5. Future Trends and Innovations in Financial Accounting Tutoring

As with just-in-time teaching, it is the tutor who has an obligation to either quickly respond to student needs or delegate the student request to others for action. To capitalize on the potential of microeconomics, Small has recently constructed a set of resources to enhance the teaching of the principles of microeconomics. The expansion of these principles of microeconomics resources to include a financial accounting focus is a development that would sit at the bottom right-hand corner of the prototyping resource map. Currently, such tutoring resources have been prototyped within a Set V – Multimedia Essay Assessment microeconomic subject. This suggests that the use of technology to assist the tutoring of student learning is an opportunity that is in its infancy.

In this book, we have argued the pivotal role of financial accounting tutors in supporting student learning. However, the role of university financial accounting tutors can be expected to change. The pervasive changes affecting the delivery of university education are likely to make some changes in the role of financial accounting tutors inevitable. In this chapter, it is argued that three advances important for the support of tertiary student learning in general can also occur within the domain of financial accounting instruction. These are the prototyping of generic student learning resources into subject-specific learning resources.