The Influence of Business Case Studies and Learning Styles in an Accounting Course: A Comment

Abstract

Given the continuing interest concerning both the use of case studies and learning styles in accounting education, the recent papers by Adler, R., Whiting, R.H. and Wynn-Williams, K. (2004), and Wynn-Williams, K., Whiting, R.H. and Adler, A. (2008) in this journal are to be welcomed. They both present evidence of their use of business case studies (BCS) in an intermediate-level accounting course in a New Zealand university, measuring students' learning styles before and after the BCS intervention. Both studies fail to report any statistically significant changes in learning styles on two of those years, and reports that learning styles have a bearing upon performance. The papers present an interesting and topical account of the use of BCS in an accounting course over an extended period. However, in our view their applied use of learning styles and the Learning Styles Inventory II (LSI-1985) in this context is methodologically questionable. This comment indicates how future research might build on their exploratory work. Issues of concern include the literature base, the psychometric properties of scores produced by the LSI-1985, and analysis and disclosure of results.