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Creating Early Success in Financial Accounting: Improving Performance on Adjusting Journal Entries *
Author(s) -
PHILLIPS FRED,
SCHMIDT REGAN N.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
accounting perspectives
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.238
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1911-3838
pISSN - 1911-382X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1911-3838.2010.00006.x
Subject(s) - accrual , accounting , set (abstract data type) , task (project management) , deferral , intervention (counseling) , financial accounting , interdependence , computer science , psychology , accounting information system , actuarial science , business , earnings , economics , management , political science , psychiatry , programming language , law
Adjusting journal entries constitute a necessary component of accrual basis accounting and are critical to the accuracy of financial statements. However, accounting students often struggle to comprehend these accounting entries, which is a concern given that failure to understand early topics in accounting courses has been found to impact course performance and selection of undergraduate major. Perceiving accounting as a language, we utilize psycholinguistic theory to understand how an instructor may improve coherence of students’ mental structures of accounting problems. We conduct an experiment to investigate the extent to which a simple instructor intervention, requiring that the initial deferral transaction be recorded, is able to improve student performance on the subsequent deferral adjustments, and whether this improvement is consistent across problem sets that differ in task difficulty. Consistent with our theoretical prediction, we find that this intervention results in improved performance. The beneficial effect of the intervention is found to differ across problem‐set task difficulty. Implications for accounting education are discussed.