CAAA Newsletter — Summer 2006

Educator’s Forum

At the CAAA conference in Niagara, June 2006 over 40 participants attended a workshop entitled “Teaching Matters…It’s all about competencies”. The article below examines some of the background to why accounting programs are being urged to become more competency based in their delivery models.  

Why change to competency based accounting education?

Many business programs in Canada were established in the early twentieth century with the specific mandate of preparing students for a professional career. Programs focused on technical knowledge; however interaction with the practitioners who served as faculty provided an opportunity for students to learn a broad range of behaviors and skills from their “war stories”.  

Bennis and O’Toole (2005) note that in the 1960’s, in response to criticisms of being more like a trade school than traditional university program, business schools began to focus on scientific research. By embracing the “publish or perish” model of hard sciences such as physics and economists, business schools began to gain respectability on campuses. As promotion and tenure became dependant upon research output, fewer practitioners were hired and classes became more oriented to the details of research and less to the integrative and multifaceted problems that are common in the business world.  

About the same time that university business schools began focusing on increasing their research output, vocational schools in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States were looking for ways to increase the job-readiness of their graduates (Boritz and Carnaghan, 2003). Programs were redesigned to be outcome-based, where students were required to demonstrate competencies derived from the expectations of performance in a particular job or profession. While many applauded the new approach based on its practicality, others criticized that it encouraged a minimum standard rather than excellence, a view reinforced by the binary competent / not competent assessment methods.

With decades of history upon which to draw, the reviews of competency based programs have been mixed. While it is clear that education based on competencies does produce a graduate who is more prepared to apply what he or she has learned to the workplace, there is less evidence to support the contention that it develops higher order skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and analytical abilities in graduates (Boritz and Carnaghan, 2003). This may be the result of the fact that much of the development of competency based education has been focused on developing work related skills for vocational school graduates.  

Despite the limitations that may exist with the competency based approach, business practitioners and professional associations are calling for universities and colleges to adopt it to bring education closer to the realities of the work world. Academic business research is seen by some to lack real world relevance; these individuals are calling for a more balanced approach to education which emphasizes both rigor and relevance. Bennis and O’Toole (2005) believe that business schools should look to other professional faculties such as law, medicine and dentistry – faculties where research is more applied than strictly scientific and teaching is based on the practice. Alison Gopnik, a cognitive scientist and leading U.S, scholar believes the best learning takes place in a “guided apprenticeship” which balances experience and expert feedback (Macklem, 2006).

Barr, R and J. Tagg. 1995. From teaching to learning – a new paradigm for undergraduate education.  Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning. (Nov/Dec): 13-25.

Bennis, W. and J. O’Toole. 2005. How Business Schools Lost their Way. Harvard Business Review. (May). Reprint R0505F.

Boritz, E. and C. Carnaghan.  2003. Competency-Based Education and Assessment for the Accounting Profession:  A Critical Review. Canadian Accounting Perspectives 2 (1): 7-42.

Macklem, K. 2006. Just quit lecturing them. Maclean’s Magazine. (http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/education/article.jsp?content=20060327_123810_123810).  Accessed on May 8, 2006.