Verifying High School Accounting Curriculum Objectives: An Indirect Assessment of Students Learning Experiences, Outcomes and Gaps

摘要

The assessment of educational plans and outcomes for verification and validation purposes is an integral part of the teaching and learning process in accounting education. This study is an outcome verification study which seeks to find out the extent to which high school accounting module content, learning materials and learning objectives are encountered by graduates of Ghanaian Senior High School (SHS) accounting curriculum. The target population consist of all High School who completed the high school accounting curriculum in 2015. Out of this, those who gained admission into the BSc. Accounting Education program of the University of Education, Winneba, in 2015 is the sample of this study. The instruments used for collecting data is questionnaire on students’ ability to perform the tasks embedded in the SHS accounting curriculum learning objectives. The findings indicate that on average three-quarters of the learning objectives are attained by SHS accounting graduates. It is established that majority of the students have learning gaps in ‘Information Technology in Accounting’, ‘Accounting for VAT’, ‘Public Sector Accounting’, ‘Company Accounts’, ‘Accounting Ratios’, and ‘Cash Flow Statement’ content areas. The learning outcomes (attained learning or learning gap) are independent of gender of students. It is found that these content areas are rarely taught in schools and this is most probably because these topics are hardly examined by examination bodies. The findings show that teachers rarely recommend the suggested learning materials to their students and hence most of the students rarely use the suggested learning materials. This may be due to unavailability of the recommended learning materials. It is recommended that policy makers should ensure access to recommended reading materials and other requisite learning materials and examination bodies should spread their test items to cover the content areas identified to be a learning gap.