How to Better Prepare Accounting Students for a Data Heavy Curriculum

An Empirical Study on Students’ Attitudes and Beliefs about Mathematics

Abstract

As accounting educators, how shall we better prepare our students for the future when data analytics becomes an imperative skill accounting graduates must be proficient with? This study aims to provide some insight to this question from the perspective of students’ attitudes and beliefs about mathematics. Educators have been trying to raise students’ attitudes toward mathematics as these attitudes have been found positively related to students’ mathematics related achievement, which includes accounting and data analytics. Using survey data, we examine whether students’ attitudes and beliefs about mathematics change as they progress in undergraduate accounting learning. We find that as students progress in accounting learning, they tend to have more positive attitudes toward mathematics on average, but their beliefs do not change. Since accounting learning requires an application of a large amount of mathematics knowledge and skills in real-world contexts, our study suggests that an emphasis on problem solving might positively raise students’ attitudes towards mathematics. Given the application nature of data analytics, our results imply that incorporating data analytics training into the accounting curriculum could potentially improve students’ attitudes toward mathematics, which might in return help students perform better in a data heavy accounting program.