Does the sequencing of accounting principles courses affect academic performance?

ABSTRACT

Research has documented the difficulty business and accounting students have in introductory accounting courses, and significant effort has focused on changes internal to the courses to try to improve student outcomes. Internationally and across the United States, most accounting programs separate introductory financial (FA) and managerial (MA) accounting into two independent courses because the course content and purpose of each are distinct. One underexplored way institutions might affect student outcomes is by determining the sequence in which students take principles courses at the same cognitive level. We use student data from a diverse non-selective institution, with 100 nations represented, combined with several econometric approaches to identify the effect, if any, of course ordering on course outcomes and long-term student outcomes for business and accounting students. Our results recommend that the practical and optimal sequencing method for accounting majors is FA before MA. For other students, we find evidence of an ‘accounting burnout effect’: students perform noticeably worse in their second accounting course regardless of sequencing, or do noticeably worse in both if taken simultaneously, another type of burnout. Given the similarities of accounting programs internationally and the diverse nature of our data, our findings can be generalized to international audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial accounting
• managerial accounting
• course sequencing
• academic performance
• accounting burnout effect

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their insightful comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to the Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) Institutional Review Board (IRB) for approving the research procedures for IRB# 17435 and the GGC Office of Institutional Research for providing data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One critical distinction between Kaminski et al. (2020) and the present study is that they do not use within-student comparisons. Put another way, they examine all grades in either course, and so the increase in success measures in the second course may be attributable to attrition/selection bias, as most of the students in their study only need to take the first course. This study compares only students who have taken both courses, and so our examination of course ordering is robust to these potential sources of bias.

2 As noted above, the results from Kaminski et al. (2020) may be explained by attrition/selection bias, so it is possible that their results are consistent with the findings of the present study.

3 (Multiple) imputation is the statistical process of replacing missing data with substituted values, using the data that are available to predict the missing value(s). Here, this was accomplished with the R package ‘mice’ (Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations), which uses the algorithm described by Van Buuren and Groothuis-Oudshoorn (2011).

4 A helpful reviewer pointed out the possibility that students are exerting additional effort in their first attempt at an accounting course, earning higher grades than expected, and then rationally adjusting effort downward to achieve their academic goals in their second course. This is an intriguing possibility that we cannot directly disentangle from ‘burnout’ given our data. Anecdotally, it is very rare to hear any student say that their first accounting course was easier than they expected, and 18% of our sample did not succeed in their first attempt at taking a principles of accounting course. It is nonetheless a possibility worth examining in future study.