Billie M. Cunningham

Critical thinking in the public accounting profession: aptitudes and attitudes

Abstract The public accounting profession has called for enhanced critical thinking skills in accounting graduates. However, critical thinking is a term which does not enjoy a universally-accepted definition. This study attempts to identify the critical thinking competencies essential to success in public accounting, and articulates those competencies to facilitate future research aimed at curricular change to meet the needs of the profession. The findings reveal that the profession uses the term critical thinking to refer to a broad set of competencies which includes both cognitive and non-cognitive attributes, attitudes, and behaviors. These competencies are presented as an operational definition of critical thinking useful to accounting education researchers.

Classroom Research and Experiential Learning: Three Successful Experiences--The Impact of Student Writing in Learning Accounting.

As the knowledge base in all disciplines continues to grow, professors face the problem of incorporating even more essential, difficult, technical material into their already content‐filled courses. Furthermore, companies are hiring more selectively than ever, requiring not only superior technical skills but also good writing skills of the people they hire. How can faculty add more technical material plus extra writing practice into already bulging courses? One solution may be to supplement typical homework problems with daily written journals. In using these journals, the students would think about and better understand difficult concepts that are not being fully understood through homework problems. Also, a byproduct of writing in daily journals would be extra writing practice and, presumably, better writing skills. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of research done in the Collin County Community College District in which four Principles of Accounting classes were used in an experimen...

THE TELECOURSE AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO A TRADITIONAL IN‐CLASS ACCOUNTING COURSE

There are many challenges involved with starting a new college, and with starting a new accounting program within a new college. One challenge to Collin County Community College District was, and still is, that of making the classes accessible to the citizens of Collin County, which has an area of 836 square miles and an estimated 1987 population of 230,000. With this challenge in mind, the Collin County Community College District faculty, following the lead of the Dallas County Community College District (its friendly, helpful neighbor to the South), decided to offer the option of tele‐courses, or self‐paced courses, to students in certain, experimental subject areas. Accounting was one of those subject areas. The accounting faculty decided to offer a self‐paced telecourse to its Financial Accounting I classes beginning in the Fall of 1986. This would be an alternative to the traditional in‐class accounting courses of the same name that were also being offered. The purpose of this paper is to share the r...