Teaching Accounting to Learners with Diverse Intelligence

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the practicality of several unconventional pedagogies recommended by researchers for the accounting curriculum, in response to the challenge of student diversity and learning ability as advocated by Howard Gardner in his Multiple Intelligence (MI) Theory which has been widely accepted in primary education. This paper is divided into two major parts; the first being quantitative analyses and the second focused on recommendations and discussions of the usefulness of various alternative pedagogies in accounting. The quantitative analysis involved an MI profiling test on 136 students from the first semester of an Australian offshore franchise business degree programme who are compulsory to complete a foundation core subject in accounting, followed by regression tests to measure the correlation between the individual MI test scores and students' mid-term examination scores. Results have proven that the logical-mathematical intelligence is undeniably more relevant to the mid-term examination scores; indicating that the 'number smart' students are more receptive to the knowledge of accounting, thus triggering the need to search for alternative pedagogies for students with the other seven distinctive intelligences as discussed in the second part of this paper.