The Michigan Accountancy Foundation sponsored this project as part of its collaborative Educator Research Grant Program "To Attract, Retain and Improve the Quality and Quantity of Accounting Majors." In this study, several faculty members from one Michigan public university focused on the introductory principles of managerial accounting course, required of all College of Business (COB) majors, as well as in some minors and other majors. The primary course objective has been to provide a basic understanding of management accounting. The course covers basic cost concepts, costing systems, cost information for planning, budgeting, control and performance evaluation, and information for managerial decision-making. Historically, the instructional approach has been mainly lecture and problem solving focusing on what may be called a "preparer" orientation; that is, how accountants would prepare various reports for management. This is reflected and reinforced, among other things, by the textbook, lecture, problem assignments, and the course being a pre-requisite for a more advanced cost/management accounting course required for accounting majors.

Many students find it a difficult course. The drop/retake rate is high. Further, both accounting faculty and accounting organizations across the nation have increasingly questioned the wisdom of teaching the course to students who fail to see its relevance to their majors. This has led to what is often called a "user" approach; that is, how business managers use managerial accounting information, rather than how accountants format the information. The basic logic and appeal of this approach is easy to understand; 85% of the students taking this course (in our experience) are not planning to be accountants and are not interested in how the information is generated, but rather on how they can use it in their day to day activities as future business managers.

The accounting faculty at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is a very proactive group that not only teaches continuous improvement but practices it as well. Over the past several years they have taken a number of steps to increase the usefulness and relevance of the accounting principles course. These include administrative changes such as discontinuing a common multiple choice exam, changes in prerequisites, increased coverage by full time tenure track faculty, and increased faculty support for enhancing the course and student experience. The faculty teaching the course held many discussions and collectively decided to streamline the content and coverage. The Michigan Accountancy Foundation (MAF) grant provided a timely incentive for focusing our attention on a way to continuously improve this important service course. This study describes the authors' systematic approach in examining this key course in the accounting curriculum, and does not purport that this is an empirical research project generalizable to other schools. However, satisfying and stimulating discussions have ensued as the authors present their challenges to accounting professionals and academics who share the common objective of improving accounting education towards the goal of higher quality information available to decision-makers of all types.

Student Survey Results

About 13% (n = 321) of the students answering the question concerning major study on the initial survey indicated that their major was accounting (or accounting information systems as EMU has a separate degree program for that). Approximately 15% (n = 211) of students responding on the final survey indicated accounting. The decrease in the number of reported responses is largely due to course attrition or attendance. The numbers also suggests that the attrition for declared accounting majors (24%) was less than that for other majors (36%).

Perhaps more significant is that of the 208 students responding to the final survey, 8 indicated they would be changing their major because of the course-3 to accounting and 5 from accounting. So on balance the efforts made in the course to provide interesting, relevant and useful information with none of the trappings of bookkeeping did not appear to have any impact on the choice of major.

In the initial survey students who were not declared accounting majors were asked to identify why they were not interested in accounting as a major. The question was open-ended and allowed for multiple responses. 240 students responded to this question with at least one item. Some judgment was used in categorization since there were no set responses. Although some responses could be viewed as amusing, such as "Mom would kill me for switching again," the fact remains that a large percentage of students still view accounting as boring (23%), uninteresting (30%), too math-oriented (25%), and all of the other traditional stereotypes. Although this information was gathered only at the beginning of the course, it is disappointing to observe that this is the start of the second semester course, meaning that the first semester financial accounting course made little progress in removing traditional stereotypes.

Through the survey the authors hoped to discover what managerial accounting topics students, especially non-majors, perceived to be most interesting and useful. Redesign of the course to focus more on those topics then, could be considered as a way of improving student perceptions. Students perceived for every topic that the material would be more useful to accountants than for their chosen career path (3.91 overall for accounting versus 3.26 for their major, Chi-Square 0.01). Responses were on a five point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree).

Excluding the "usefulness to accountants" question, all seven other questions as well as average scores for all topics and all Excel spreadsheet projects (which are used to expand and reinforce various course topics), had average scores ranging from 3.1 to 3.7. On balance, students found the material interesting, easy to understand, sufficient in depth, and useful. They found that the spreadsheet projects enhanced their skills and their understanding of course material. And they found that the course coverage made accounting an interesting field (3.28 average response). An additional question concerning testing frequency indicated that 49% preferred testing every three chapters and 37% every two chapters. The total of 86% indicates that very few students preferred testing more or less frequently than every two or three chapters.

Conclusions

While negative stereotypes about accounting were pervasive, overall, students still found the course coverage in the second semester introductory (managerial) accounting course to be more interesting and useful than not. The course was structured to avoid bookkeeping and run at what was perceived to be a moderate pace. Some emphasis was also placed on the development and use of spreadsheet skills. Despite what was believed to be a student oriented and more modern and "user-friendly" approach to the course, no significant changes to or from the accounting major occurred. Students mostly perceived the coverage to be more useful for accounting majors than other majors.

Also, in an effort to determine if certain topics might create a better base for improvement than others, no areas of significance were found. The authors believed that some topics would be perceived as more interesting and useful than others, although this is not addressed in prior research, and was not the case in this study. However, the time spent by the researchers in collaborating and discussing the impact of the principles courses as service courses to the College of Business and on the accounting curriculum was invaluable.

Recommendations

While the results of the research are not fully as expected, there are several recommendations that can be made based on the study (directly and indirectly) and our review of current accounting education literature. What is evident is that negative stereotypes of accounting are pervasive and influence career choice. Instructors should continue to revise and refine course content to enhance utility and emphasize the diverse opportunities in accounting. Emphasis should be shifted from mathematical "number crunching" skills to communication, interpersonal, analytical, synthesizing and critical thinking skills. Instructors should experiment with nontraditional delivery methods that are in sync with the instructors' own personality and strengths. It is important to directly address the negative stereotype issues and incorporate changing negative perceptions as an explicit course objective. Instructors should actively seek and present positive information about accounting and accountants such as news, articles, cartoons, and video clips, as well as presentations by accounting alumni and practitioners. It is also important to continually assess the effectiveness of the course and delivery using mid-semester evaluations and other assessment approaches. The authors continue to collect similar data to compare to this base line.

Consideration should be given to: advertising and publicity campaigns focusing on, high school students and college freshmen enrolled in Introduction to Business courses (a class required of each EMU business major); providing information, promotional material, and training to high school teachers and counselors; developing and maintaining a resources library and discussion groups for introductory accounting instructors; and funding research that focuses on study of stereotypes and ways and means of changing such stereotypes.

As a result of their close involvement with planning for the course in implementing this project, the authors decided to remove the financial accounting prerequisite to the managerial accounting course and the prerequisite to the follow-up cost accounting course. Other changes made were, to mentor the honors students, expose students to the variety of challenging issues faced by accountants in "The New Finance" or "The New Economy," use more technology in and out of the classroom (including course websites with threaded discussions and email), and incorporate academic service learning assignments into the honors section so students can learn the course objectives while serving community organizations. A "bridge" course between the principles courses and intermediate accounting courses was designed to develop competencies needed by accounting majors in the accounting cycle and recording accounting transactions into an accounting information system using double-entry accounting (debits and credits). Each of these initiatives will be evaluated through the continuous improvement process now in place at the authors' schools.