Self-regulated learning and cognitive load theory have provided the theoretical underpinning for a significant number of accounting education studies in the last 25 years. These two educational pillars are currently being reexamined to consider possible connections between the theories. As theorists explore potential bridges with eyes on a new research paradigm, conversation is redirected to implications for the accounting classroom. The introductory accounting course may provide a rich context for exploring the intersection of the two theories. This course is often characterized by novice learners who must face difficult, complex content but often lack self-monitoring skills. A study was conducted in an introductory accounting course to investigate whether an instructional tool designed to reduce the difficulty of a complex accounting task could also provide the diagnostic cues learners need for self-monitoring. The results of this study support the notion that these two theories may intersect in a meaningful way. This exploratory study holds significant potential for improving accounting instruction and provides fertile ground for future accounting education research.
This study examines the motivational factors that influence accounting faculty's engagement with professional practice in Turkiye, drawing on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as the theoretical framework. Despite sustained international interest in the academic-practice gap in accounting education, the motivational dynamics that drive individual faculty to maintain or disengage from professional links remain underexplored. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 accounting faculty members drawn from six Turkish universities representing contrasting institutional types. Thematic analysis reveals that both intrinsic motivators and extrinsic motivators shape engagement decisions. The satisfaction of SDT's three basic psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, distinguishes sustained, high-quality engagement from peripheral involvement, with a notable dual dynamic emerging in relatedness whereby practice engagement simultaneously connects faculty to professional communities while risking their distancing from academic peers. Structural barriers, particularly the overriding emphasis on publication metrics in promotion criteria, consistently undermine engagement regardless of individual motivation. This study contributes to theory by extending SDT to faculty professional practice engagement and identifying the internalisation trajectory as a mechanism for developing autonomous motivation. Practically, findings offer evidence-based guidance for administrators, faculty, and professional bodies seeking to align institutional conditions with the motivational needs that sustain meaningful academic-practice integration.
This study evaluates the impact on students' ethical cognition after attending a course on auditing, emphasizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a pedagogy based on the Multimodal Sandwich Approach (MSA), incorporating practitioner narratives, academic readings, group discussion and case study analysis. Data was collected from a survey administered to 160 final year accounting students in a pre-test/post-test design grounded in Rest's (1986. Moral development: Advances in research and theory. Praeger) Four-Component Model (FCM) - moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral character. The results indicate a significant improvement in ethical cognition across all four ethical dimensions of the FCM. The findings empirically validate the MSA in enhancing accounting students' ethical cognition in an AI-infused auditing course. The results have implications for universities, accrediting authorities and regulatory bodies to integrate MSA into the auditing curricula, addressing ethical concerns within AI-audit guidelines. Future research is suggested to examine the longitudinal impacts and cross-contextual applicability of MSA.
Accounting ethics education increasingly emphasises authentic experiential learning that enables students to engage with ethical issues in realistic professional contexts. While simulations and internships are widely used, short-term, high-intensity experiences that expose students to legal accountability remain underexplored. This study examines accounting students' affective, cognitive, and behavioural reflections after attending a court hearing involving an accounting-related fraud case. Drawing on Kolb's experiential learning cycle and Wilson and Beard's stimulus-based reflection model, we analyse affective, cognitive, and behavioural reflections captured through an immediate open-ended survey of 95 students at a Chinese university. The findings show a coherent experiential learning process: students reported strong affective responses, followed by cognitive re-framing of professional responsibility, internal controls, and ethics education, and culminating in behavioural intentions to resist unethical pressure and seek support. The study provides evidence that court hearings can be a feasible experiential learning intervention that integrates technical accounting knowledge with ethical judgement and broadens pedagogical approaches in accounting ethics education.
Technological change is reshaping the accounting profession, yet the integration of emerging technologies into accounting education depends not only on faculty capabilities but also on how technological expectations become institutionalised within universities. This study examines how accounting faculty in Indonesia respond when technological expectations become institutional priorities and how these responses are translated into teaching practice. Drawing on institutional work theory, it analyses semi-structured interviews with accounting faculty at a private Indonesian university. The findings show that technology was first valorised as a legitimate and desirable direction, lecturer alignment was produced through enabling and policing mechanisms, and pedagogical enactment remained selective, bounded, and only partially routinised. Lecturers were often willing to engage with technology when it was directly tied to teaching responsibilities, but sustained uptake was constrained by workload, role-specific relevance, institutional support, and material conditions. The study contributes by shifting attention from technology adoption as individual readiness or resistance to the institutional processes through which technological priorities are valued, reinforced, and enacted in practice. It also broadens the geographical scope of accounting education research by examining an Indonesian private university context.
This study investigates how religiosity moderates the relationships between Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and the psychosocial factors (attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control) shaping students' intentions to engage in sustainability accounting and reporting (SAR). Guided by the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and Social Norm Theory, the study employs a qualitative research design. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with final-year undergraduate accounting students at six universities in Ghana. The findings indicate that ESD primarily shapes perceived behavioural control, yet its largely theory-driven delivery limits students' self-efficacy in applying IFRS S1 and S2 in practice. In contrast, attitudes and subjective norms were not strongly derived from classroom learning but were instead informed by personal values, professional expectations, and broader social influences. Religiosity did not emerge as a direct predictor of intention. Rather, it functioned as a contextual moderator that conditioned how strongly favourable attitudes and perceived social expectations were translated into intention. This study contributes to accounting education literature by clarifying how self-efficacy operates as a core dimension of perceived behavioural control within the TPB. It further theoretically positions religiosity as a moderating influence that strengthens the attitude-intention and subjective norm - intention pathways in culturally embedded settings.
First-year financial accounting students face high content volume and limited access to timely formative feedback, a gap that scalable digital tools could address. This study examines whether voluntary engagement with a fully gamified self-testing app 'DUGA' improves exam performance, and which dimensions of engagement matter most. Data were collected across two independent cohorts (N = 1,248) at an open-access European university using a quasi-experimental design. We compare exam performance between voluntary app users, rigorously controlling for prior accounting ability. We decompose engagement into two distinct indicators: intensity (quantity of questions attempted) and accuracy (proportion answered correctly). Results show that voluntary app users significantly outperform non-users. Among users, accuracy is strongly, positively associated with exam performance, whereas intensity alone is not. Accuracy fully mediates the intensity-performance relationship, indicating that it is not engagement volume itself, but the quality of engagement it produces, that drives exam performance. Moreover, intensity and accuracy combine synergistically: students who practise both frequently and accurately achieve greater exam gains than accuracy would predict independently. These findings help explain mixed evidence in prior gamification research by distinguishing engagement quality from engagement quantity and offer practical guidance for accounting educators on the design and implementation of gamified self-testing tools.
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted educational practices, leading to increased reliance on lecture capture systems (LCS). However, the long-term evolution of student perceptions of LCS remains under-researched, particularly when comparing pre- and post-pandemic patterns. This study addresses this gap by providing critical insights for accounting education, where the review of complex numerical content is vital for success. Drawing on 314 survey responses from pre- and post-COVID cohorts at a UK university, findings are contextualised using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, with a specific robustness check to control for shifts in student demographics. While usage frequency increased significantly post-pandemic, a construct-level analysis revealed that Effort Expectancy shifted significantly in the full sample (p = .029). However, a robustness check indicated this shift was contingent on language background. When limited to native English speakers, no significant perceptual shifts were found (p = .356), suggesting that the observed increase in 'ease of use' was an artifact of the demographic shift in the student population. Performance Expectancy and Social Influence remained stable across both cohorts. These results highlight that while usage has intensified, students' underlying beliefs regarding the utility and social necessity of LCS have not undergone a fundamental transformation.
The curriculum in contemporary accounting education is often organised around technically examinable proficiency in financial reporting and measurement. While foundational, this emphasis can narrow what students learn to recognise, justify, and contest as accountability, particularly when accountability concerns social consequences, ecological impacts, and the moral judgements embedded in recognition, measurement, and valuation. Drawing on interdisciplinary and critical perspectives on accounting (ICPA), and viewing accounting as a technical, social, and moral practice, this study examines how, and to what extent, broader accountability is encoded in a mainstream undergraduate accounting programme, and whether it survives as an assessable component. A qualitative curriculum document analysis of 24 course syllabi is conducted. Learning outcomes, weekly topic schedules, assessment tasks, and rubrics are coded to distinguish curricular presence from assessable requirements, alongside four indicators of Social and Environmental Accounting (S&EA) engagement. The results show that assessable requirements concentrate on the technical dimension, while social and moral dimensions are weakly specified in assessment expectations. Across core courses, no evidence is found that S&EA is translated into assessable requirements. An assessability gap is identified, and assessment-centred implications are developed for integrating broader accountability into core accounting competence.
This mixed methods study integrates the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) with Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) theory to examine accounting and finance students' perceptions and use of generative AI (GenAI) across three institutional settings in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hungary. Drawing on survey data from 523 students collected in 2024, it employs nonparametric statistical analyses alongside thematic analysis using Leximancer 5.0 within a convergent parallel mixed methods design. Results show that students primarily use GenAI for research and idea generation, with significant cross-institutional variation in academic tasks. While 73% of students were at least moderately familiar with GenAI tools, only 24% reported engagement with institutional guidelines. Students recognise GenAI's employability benefits yet concerns about academic integrity and over-reliance persist across all contexts. Institutional guidance differed substantially, with the Hungarian institution reporting lower availability (mean = 0.42) than the Australian (mean = 1.38) and UK (mean = 1.57) institutions. Guideline availability is positively associated with students' verification practices (gamma = 0.272, p = .024). Qualitative findings underline educator-led GenAI integration to support critical thinking and ethical judgement. The study offers evidence-based insights to inform curriculum design, assessment practices, and institutional policy in accounting higher education.
English medium instruction (EMI) is increasingly common in higher education. However, in Africa, where English is not the first language for most of the population, EMI presents unique challenges, particularly in multilingual accounting classrooms where cognitive load can be intensified. This study examines the influence of EMI on the cognitive demands of learning and teaching accounting in multilingual classrooms in both rural and urban contexts. Guided by cognitive load theory as an interpretive framework, this study draws on qualitative data from questionnaires and interviews with educators in rural South Africa and urban Namibia. Findings reveal that limited English proficiency increased intrinsic cognitive load when students engaged with complex accounting content. Linguistic diversity further exacerbated extraneous load, especially in rural settings where multiple local languages intersected. While both rural and urban educators used English as a unifying instructional medium, their strategies differed. Rural educators frequently employed code-switching, while urban educators focused on adapting materials and leveraging institutional infrastructure. The study underscores the need for institutional support and inclusive curriculum design to help educators manage students' cognitive load in linguistically diverse EMI accounting classrooms.
This study explores the perceptions of accounting professionals in the United Arab Emirates regarding the importance of integrating data analytics into accounting education to enhance graduate employability. Using Q methodology, 97 professionals evaluated 35 statements across three themes: data analytics knowledge and awareness, curriculum content, and data-analytics skills and competencies. The analysis, conducted with KenQ Analysis Desktop Edition software, revealed a strong awareness among professionals of the critical role data analytics plays in modern accounting practice. The findings indicate broad support for embedding specific topics in accounting curricula, particularly data structure/ data warehouses, data governance, business intelligence tools, data mining and predictive modeling, regression analysis, and Excel- based techniques such as formulas, filtering, sorting, and lookups. Respondents also emphasized practical competencies in capturing, disseminating, aggregating and integrating data, and applying descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. The study offers valuable guidance for accounting educators and curriculum designers by emphasizing the need to revise both the content and the delivery of accounting education to meet evolving industry demands. It highlights the necessity of equipping graduates with data-driven competencies that align with the accounting profession's digital transformation. The study provides evidence- based insights into how accounting professionals prioritize data- analytics knowledge and awareness, curriculum content, and skills
The accounting profession is facing a critical era, marked by a global shortage of accounting professionals that has reached unprecedented levels. The survey-based empirical findings and supporting psychological theoretical foundations of this study emphasise the significance of identifying and understanding students' attitudes towards accounting and the profession in addressing this shortage. Applying retrospective cross-sectional methodology, this study identifies students' attitudes towards accounting and the profession and analyses how these change over time at university. Before university, students held a negative attitude towards accounting and the profession, with many of their beliefs identifying with negative stereotypes. By the final semester of university, students' attitude scores became positive through the strengthening or introduction of new positive beliefs and the loss of negative beliefs. This study identified that the intention to study accounting was a critical component of positive attitudes, increasing the probability of a student pursuing a career in accounting. The results signal to stakeholders that more positive exposure to accounting is critical before university to correct the negative stereotypes and ensure an accurate narrative. While this approach would not yield an immediate solution to the graduate shortage, it will build a more sustainable solution and deliver wider benefits to all stakeholders.
This study investigates how the integration of experiential learning through structured debates enhances student engagement and the comprehension of complex corporate governance concepts in accounting education. Grounded in Kolb's experiential learning theory, this research addresses the global demand for pedagogical innovations that transition students from passive knowledge recipients to active problem-solvers. Using a qualitative case study of 151 students participating in an advanced corporate governance course, this study examines the application of pseudo-mock trials as a resource-efficient alternative to full-scale mock trial instruction. Data derived from student evaluations and instructor reflections demonstrate that this interactive approach fosters higher-order thinking and ethical reasoning by requiring students to synthesize information and defend arguments within a simulated fraud scenario. This study contributes an empirical pedagogical model and a reflexive framework for its implementation, offering transferable knowledge for accounting educators seeking to adopt scalable, high-impact experiential learning strategies globally.
Widespread use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as ChatGPT, has disrupted education, particularly in accounting, where ChatGPT can perform well in traditional assessments. This study examines ChatGPT's impact on accounting education across five countries, exploring educators' perceptions, challenges, adaptations, experiences and institutional responses. Despite calls to embrace GenAI, accounting educators expressed concern about the implications. This study provides a snapshot of their views, their insights, investigating challenges, experiences and innovative pedagogical strategies. A thematic analysis of reflections from accounting academics across the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, supplemented by focus groups, captures educators' lived experiences. These included fears about academic integrity, seeking comfort in invigilated exams, uncertainty about ethical issues and varying institutional support. Many educators felt GenAI could facilitate opportunities to enhance learning, rethink assessment design, and should be embraced similarly to previous technological disruptions to accounting education. This study contributes to accounting education by documenting how accounting educators across five countries responded to the emergence of ChatGPT. It captures the strategies that educators described using to protect assessment integrity and support student learning in the early stages of GenAI adoption, offering insight into how accounting educators navigated this period of disruption.
This paper develops Applied Professional Formation (APF) as a conceptual framework for explaining how professional formation in accounting education (AE) occurs under contemporary conditions where learning spans academic study, workplace participation, and digitally mediated practice. Existing approaches largely respond to these conditions through curricular reform or skills development, but offer limited theoretical account of how professional identity and judgment develop across such settings. APF addresses this limitation by conceptualising professional formation as a process shaped by participation across domains, mediated through boundary crossing and identity work. In doing so, it challenges dominant linear assumptions in which education precedes practice and professional formation is treated as a by-product of work exposure. The framework is illustrated through a design-oriented example from AE, using a degree apprenticeship context to render formation processes visible without offering empirical evaluation. The paper advances a theoretically integrated account of professional formation and provides a robust basis for analysing and designing AE under increasingly hybrid conditions.
The numerous benefits of AI technology are expected to enhance the quality of accounting and business education at the higher education level. To effectively implement AI in this context, it is critical to identify the factors that influence educators' intentions to adopt AI technology. This study extends the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by incorporating educators' optimism and pedagogical beliefs to examine their influence on the intention to use AI in accounting and business education. Survey data were collected from 400 educators in Indonesia and analyzed using the PLS-SEM approach. The findings show that educators with constructivist mindsets are more inclined to use AI for educational purposes than those with transmissive beliefs. TAM factors, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, serve as indicators of optimism toward AI use, which then affects behavioral intention. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the role of pedagogical beliefs, optimism, and TAM factors in integrating AI into accounting and business education. This study also highlights the importance of fostering a constructivist mindset among educators and developing AI tools that are user-friendly and beneficial. Such efforts are likely to increase educators' optimism and willingness to adopt AI in accounting and business courses.
