Accounting is widely regarded as a complex subject, and traditional teaching methods often fail to fully engage students or enhance learning outcomes. This study investigates the effectiveness of gamification and vocational programmes as pedagogical approaches to improve student engagement and academic performance in accounting education. A quantitative research design was employed, with primary data collected from 254 undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in accounting and vocational accounting programmes across India. Measurement scales were adapted from validated studies, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was applied using SmartPLS 4.0 to test the proposed hypotheses. The results indicate that gamification has a significant positive effect on student engagement (β = 0.683, p < 0.001) but does not directly influence academic performance (β = 0.017, p = 0.448). Conversely, vocational programmes positively affect both engagement (β = 0.264, p = 0.014) and academic performance (β = 0.903, p < 0.001). These findings suggest that while gamified interventions enhance motivation, participation, and collaboration, practical and skill-based vocational training is essential for improving measurable learning outcomes. This study contributes to the accounting education literature by demonstrating the complementary roles of gamification and vocational programmes, emphasizing the importance of integrating motivational and performance-oriented pedagogical strategies. For educators and curriculum designers, combining gamified learning with vocationally oriented activities offers a promising approach to increase engagement, reinforce conceptual understanding, and prepare students for real-world professional challenges. The study also provides implications for curriculum design, policy development, and future research on hybrid pedagogical models.

Purpose: Accounting education at the high school level is still dominated by a theoretical approach, resulting in relatively low levels of practical understanding and student interest in accounting. This Community Service (PKM) activity aims to improve students’ understanding, digital literacy, and interest in accounting by using the Accurate application as a technology-based learning tool. Method: The event was held at Kristoforus 2 High School on April 17, 2026, and involved 21 11th-grade students. The method used was a workshop with an educational-participatory approach, featuring an introduction to accounting, a demonstration of the Accurate application, guided practice, discussions, and an evaluation using a questionnaire. Results and Discussion: Before the intervention, most students had never used accounting software and only had a theoretical understanding of accounting concepts. The evaluation results showed that all participants found the activity beneficial, with 19 students giving a score of 5 and 10 students giving a score of 4 for the increase in knowledge gained. Implications: This program helps improve students' accounting and digital literacy and supports more interactive and context-based accounting education.

ABSTRACT In considering the role critical accounting educators can play in social movements, this paper proposes an approach for engaging students in transformative accountability education grounded in community organising methodology and practice. Community organising seeks to build civil society’s relational power for collective action that holds power to account. In this paper, we outline the experiential practices through which we have engaged students in community organising, fostering deep and sustained engagement with transformative accountability. By collaborating with students and community partners on campaigns, we demonstrate how accounting and accountability can be taught differently and how we, as critical educators, can increase the civic impact of the business school and the university by contributing meaningfully to social movements. In this paper, we reflect on our experience developing and delivering community organising education and share the lessons learned for critical accounting education, including the value of co-creating accountability with students, and the impact of adopting a dialogic, practice-based approach to education.

ABSTRACT Self-regulated learning and cognitive load theory have provided the theoretical underpinning for a significant number of accounting education studies in the last 25 years. These two educational pillars are currently being reexamined to consider possible connections between the theories. As theorists explore potential bridges with eyes on a new research paradigm, conversation is redirected to implications for the accounting classroom. The introductory accounting course may provide a rich context for exploring the intersection of the two theories. This course is often characterized by novice learners who must face difficult, complex content but often lack self-monitoring skills. A study was conducted in an introductory accounting course to investigate whether an instructional tool designed to reduce the difficulty of a complex accounting task could also provide the diagnostic cues learners need for self-monitoring. The results of this study support the notion that these two theories may intersect in a meaningful way. This exploratory study holds significant potential for improving accounting instruction and provides fertile ground for future accounting education research.

Intermediate Financial Accounting is the core compulsory course of accounting, financial management and auditing majors, which undertakes the key task of connecting basic accounting theories and industry practical application. Traditional practical teaching of intermediate financial accounting faces prominent dilemmas such as fragmented teaching links, insufficient restoration of enterprise real business scenarios, lagging practical content matching industry standards, and low student participation efficiency, which leads to the disconnection between accounting talent training and enterprise post demand. Virtual simulation technology, as a new digital teaching empowerment tool, can break through the spatial and temporal limitations of traditional teaching, realize the full-scene, full-link and full-cycle simulation of enterprise financial accounting business, and provide a new reform path for the optimization of accounting practical teaching system. Based on the whole-process closed-loop teaching theory and immersive situational cognitive learning theory, this paper takes the full-process practical teaching of intermediate financial accounting as the research object, constructs a full-process practical teaching reform system driven by virtual simulation technology, covering teaching scenario construction, curriculum content iteration, teaching mode innovation, teaching evaluation optimization and teacher team empowerment. Combined with the latest industry education data in 2025, this paper verifies the reform effect through comparative experiments, questionnaire surveys and data statistical analysis, and standardizes the demonstration with charts and statistical formulas. The research finds that the virtual simulation-driven full-process teaching reform can significantly improve students' professional operation ability, comprehensive business judgment ability and post adaptive competence, and effectively solve the pain points of disconnection between teaching and practice in traditional accounting teaching. This research enriches the theoretical system of digital accounting education reform, provides feasible practical experience and standardized reform paradigm for the practical teaching innovation of financial accounting courses in colleges and universities, and offers high-quality research support for the high-quality development of accounting vocational education and talent training docking industry needs.

Against the backdrop of the Belt and Road Initiative, international business students in China encounter prominent obstacles in general accounting learning, including insufficient prior professional knowledge, dual language and cultural barriers, and rigid localized teaching resources, which greatly reduce their learning effectiveness and cross-border business adaptation. Targeting the teaching dilemmas of non-accounting international students, this study adopts literature review and case study to explore the application mechanism of generative AI in accounting case teaching. It constructs a closed-loop pre-class, in-class and after-class AI-empowered teaching model and proposes practical optimization paths regarding case resource development, whole-process teaching implementation and supporting guarantee systems. The findings indicate that generative AI can effectively reduce cognitive load, eliminate cross-cultural learning barriers and realize personalized contextual teaching. This research fills the existing pedagogical gap, facilitates the digital transformation of international accounting education, and provides practical references for cultivating high-quality cross-border business talents for the Belt and Road Initiative.

ABSTRACT The curriculum in contemporary accounting education is often organised around technically examinable proficiency in financial reporting and measurement. While foundational, this emphasis can narrow what students learn to recognise, justify, and contest as accountability, particularly when accountability concerns social consequences, ecological impacts, and the moral judgements embedded in recognition, measurement, and valuation. Drawing on interdisciplinary and critical perspectives on accounting (ICPA), and viewing accounting as a technical, social, and moral practice, this study examines how, and to what extent, broader accountability is encoded in a mainstream undergraduate accounting programme, and whether it survives as an assessable component. A qualitative curriculum document analysis of 24 course syllabi is conducted. Learning outcomes, weekly topic schedules, assessment tasks, and rubrics are coded to distinguish curricular presence from assessable requirements, alongside four indicators of Social and Environmental Accounting (S&EA) engagement. The results show that assessable requirements concentrate on the technical dimension, while social and moral dimensions are weakly specified in assessment expectations. Across core courses, no evidence is found that S&EA is translated into assessable requirements. An assessability gap is identified, and assessment-centred implications are developed for integrating broader accountability into core accounting competence.

Research has shown how accounting is an important tool in the weaponry of colonial and neocolonial powers. However, less is known on how accounting education can be a means to ensure the silent reproduction of Western values and priorities. This study explores the relationship between current arrangements in university accounting education in Pakistan and neocolonialism. The paper is based on interviews with the three main categories of actors who have an impact on higher education, namely accounting policymakers, educators and students, and adopts Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony and the role of intellectuals in society. Policymakers, who enjoy strong ties with large multinational corporations, through accreditation mechanisms influence the meanings and content of accounting education, which educators then transmit to students, thereby altering their ‘common sense’. Consistently, many students are influenced by beliefs such as the primacy of the West and its ‘neutral’ practices and the need to embrace internationalisation. Nevertheless, others refuse such taken for granted assumptions and act as potential ‘organic intellectuals’, who may fuel the creation of new understandings around the role and content of accounting education in developing countries.

Relevance enhanced: The use of business simulation in an introductory accounting course

A study of modular contents and related teaching techniques in fraud & forensic accounting education from North American academicians’ perspective

ABSTRACT This qualitative study examines how normative institutional pressures influence the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in management accounting and how these pressures shape the transformation of management accounting education. Drawing on institutional theory, the study focuses on normative isomorphism arising from professional norms, standards, and expectations that guide organizational behavior. It also distinguishes between normative and coercive pressures and considers their interaction in shaping organizational responses. Empirical evidence is based on 12 semistructured interviews with management accounting and AI experts from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and selected large firms used for comparison in Austria, Germany, and the United States. The findings reveal that professional bodies, regulatory frameworks, and industry norms play a central role in legitimizing AI use in management accounting by promoting ethical guidelines, competency frameworks, and standardized practices. AI adoption is thereby understood as a socially embedded process shaped by institutional expectations rather than purely technological considerations. These pressures not only affect organizational adoption strategies but also translate into new educational requirements, particularly regarding data literacy, critical thinking, ethical awareness, and interdisciplinary skills. The analysis identifies key thematic patterns and highlights how SMEs interpret and respond to institutional expectations under resource constraints. Cross-country comparisons highlight context-specific variations in the intensity and sources of institutional pressures, while comparisons between SMEs and large firms reveal variation in the scale and formality of AI-related educational responses. The study contributes to the literature by providing an empirically grounded and conceptually structured analysis of institutional pressures as a driver of AI adoption in management accounting and by outlining implications for the redesign of management accounting education. It further develops a conceptually structured framework linking institutional pressures, organizational responses, and capability development. The findings offer practice-oriented insights for educators, professional bodies, and policy makers seeking to prepare future management accountants for an AI-driven professional environment.

Prospective teachers should participate in pedagogical competency programs and engage in teaching practice to become professional teachers. The urgency of this study lies in examining the factors that influence career choices and assessing the quality of future professional teachers. This study investigates the effects of career self-efficacy (SE) and career interest (CI) on career choice (CC), with career exploration (CE) as a mediator, during the teaching internship. The population was 675 accounting education students who participated in the teaching internship program. The study used a simple random sampling method, yielding 251 respondents. The questionnaire included the career decision-making career self-efficacy scale-short form (CDMSE-SF), career exploration survey (CES), and career choice. A quantitative approach using structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed in WarpPLS 5.0. The study results show a direct relationship between career self-efficacy, career interest, and career exploration on career choice. Career exploration at the teaching internship also mediates the relationship between career self-efficacy and career interest in teaching career choice. It indicates that teaching internship programs increase students' confidence, thereby strengthening their resolve to pursue a career as an accounting teacher. Future studies may also explore other variables such as outcome expectations and personal background factors.

Purpose This essay examines a failed attempt to write an accounting essay during doctoral training in order to reflect on a formative difficulty in early-career accounting research. It focuses on a moment in which the search for an intellectually admissible framing entered the writing before the problem itself had acquired enough explanatory definition. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts an autoethnographic orientation of the researcher-is-researched kind. It revisits a failed essay on profit distribution after socio-environmental devastation and uses that episode to examine how writing, intellectual formation and disciplinary expectations become entangled within accounting academia. Findings The failed draft exposed a difficulty more specific than a generic difficulty in relation to theory. A methodological and philosophical orientation towards inquiry had been drawn into the text before the phenomenon itself had been sufficiently clarified. The episode also showed how inherited assumptions about profit, technical accounting education, and the distance between intellectual exposure and usable command can converge in ways that make an incipient argument stall. Revisiting that failure clarified the importance of staying closer to the phenomenon, selecting explanatory resources more firmly, and resisting the premature search for an admissible conceptual frame. Originality/value The essay contributes to accounting scholarship by shifting attention to an earlier and less visible stage of academic production, before submission and peer review, and by showing how a failed writing episode can illuminate the formation of an early-career researcher in accounting. Its originality lies in examining how admissibility, explanation, and disciplinary formation become entangled in the act of writing itself.

ABSTRACT This study aims to examine whether the local wisdom approach can effectively investigate whether local wisdom-based accounting education and research can be ideally implemented. To conduct this study, we employed a critical case study method, involving interviews with three informants who initiated the local wisdom approach. This study found that the accounting education and research approach developed by the informants was idealistic, focusing on the values of local wisdom. However, several internal and external factors within the academic community hindered the ideal operation of this research, leading to divisions. Therefore, this study recommends consolidating academics committed to developing the local wisdom approach. This consolidation presents opportunities for academics to develop their idealism fully.

ABSTRACT This paper develops Applied Professional Formation (APF) as a conceptual framework for explaining how professional formation in accounting education (AE) occurs under contemporary conditions where learning spans academic study, workplace participation, and digitally mediated practice. Existing approaches largely respond to these conditions through curricular reform or skills development, but offer limited theoretical account of how professional identity and judgment develop across such settings. APF addresses this limitation by conceptualising professional formation as a process shaped by participation across domains, mediated through boundary crossing and identity work. In doing so, it challenges dominant linear assumptions in which education precedes practice and professional formation is treated as a by-product of work exposure. The framework is illustrated through a design-oriented example from AE, using a degree apprenticeship context to render formation processes visible without offering empirical evaluation. The paper advances a theoretically integrated account of professional formation and provides a robust basis for analysing and designing AE under increasingly hybrid conditions.

ABSTRACT Widespread use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as ChatGPT, has disrupted education, particularly in accounting, where ChatGPT can perform well in traditional assessments. This study examines ChatGPT's impact on accounting education across five countries, exploring educators’ perceptions, challenges, adaptations, experiences and institutional responses. Despite calls to embrace GenAI, accounting educators expressed concern about the implications. This study provides a snapshot of their views, their insights, investigating challenges, experiences and innovative pedagogical strategies. A thematic analysis of reflections from accounting academics across the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, supplemented by focus groups, captures educators’ lived experiences. These included fears about academic integrity, seeking comfort in invigilated exams, uncertainty about ethical issues and varying institutional support. Many educators felt GenAI could facilitate opportunities to enhance learning, rethink assessment design, and should be embraced similarly to previous technological disruptions to accounting education. This study contributes to accounting education by documenting how accounting educators across five countries responded to the emergence of ChatGPT. It captures the strategies that educators described using to protect assessment integrity and support student learning in the early stages of GenAI adoption, offering insight into how accounting educators navigated this period of disruption.

Purpose This study aims to examine accounting scholars’ engagement with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), based on Carnegie et al.’s (2021) multidimensional definition of accounting. Design/methodology/approach Applying a framework adapted from Carnegie et al. (2023), a qualitative content analysis approach is adopted to examine 24 SDG-focused articles published across eight high-profile accounting journals from 2016 to 2024. Findings Accounting scholars’ engagement with the SGDs remains low and peripheral, rather than mainstream. Analysis reveals three critical gaps in research on the SDGs: it disproportionately attends to the technical dimension (disclosure) while largely neglecting the social (social and policy implications) and moral (stakeholder and planetary interests) dimensions; it concentrates on limited, specific SDGs and on developed countries; and it approaches SDGs as routine rather than potentially transformative. Practical implications This study identifies specific pathways for advancing SDG accounting research: embracing interdisciplinary approaches; extending beyond organisational boundaries; focusing on developing countries and under-represented SDGs; addressing social and moral considerations and implications; promoting SDG accounting education; collaborating with other stakeholders; and increasing SDG publications by accounting journals. Social implications By highlighting both social and moral dimensions, this study encourages scholarship that advances accounting’s social functions, policies and engagement with stakeholder and planetary interests. Originality/value This study reveals systematic imbalances in how accounting scholarship engages with the SDGs. Addressing this critical issue requires a fundamental reorientation for accounting scholarship to meaningfully contribute to sustainable development.

The development of digital technology and student lifestyle trends are changing the mindset and methods of the younger generation in managing their finances. However, this change needs to be balanced with increased financial literacy, which plays a crucial role in shaping more rational and planned financial behavior. The research focuses on analyzing the influence of financial technology, financial literacy, and lifestyle on the financial behavior of students at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas PGRI Kanjuruhan Malang. The ongoing research applies a quantitative descriptive approach involving 85 students from the Economics, Management, and Accounting Education study programs as the research sample. Simple random sampling was chosen as the sampling method in this study, while the data collection stage was carried out through the distribution of closed questionnaires. Data analysis was carried out through multiple linear regression that has passed the classical assumption test. Referring to the analysis findings, it was found that financial technology, financial literacy, and lifestyle simultaneously significantly influence students' financial behavior. However, individually, only financial literacy has a significant effect.

This study investigates how the Functional Accounting Education curriculum in Mumbai colleges empowers young people by improving their potential and preparedness for future career challenges. It uses a multidimensional view of empowerment, including knowledge, skills, attitudes, and decision-making abilities, and examines its connection with financial literacy, self-efficacy, and employability. A Quantitative-methods approach was adopted, combining survey data from commerce graduates and recruiters. Statistical methods, such as the Friedman and chi-square tests, were used to explore factors affecting job placement and the importance of spe- cific curriculum elements. The results show strong agreement between young peo- ple and recruiters on the importance of communication and problem-solving skills, while technical knowledge was rated as less important by graduates. The study also finds widespread consensus on curriculum reform priorities, including adding more case studies, reducing emphasis on theory-based exams, and selectively improving the curriculum. It provides practical recommendations for educational institutions to strengthen skill development, increase industry engagement, and continuously update curricula. These efforts can support the overall development and employability of commerce graduates in the changing fields of finance and accounting.

The pandemic has brought about a transformation in accounting education; increasing digitalization and distance learning have affected faculty and students in various ways; the changes in the planning and implementation of the educational process have become issues that require careful consideration. In this context, evaluating the views and thoughts of students—who are key stakeholders in the educational process—has gained importance. In this context, the aim of this study is to identify the views and expectations of university students—who are the future potential accounting professionals and auditors—regarding online accounting education, specifically in Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. To this end, a survey was administered to 400 students enrolled in accounting programs across various departments at Sakarya University, Kyrgyzstan-Turkey Manas University, Azerbaijan State University of Economics, and Hoca Ahmet Yesevi University. The data collected for the study were analyzed using the SPSS-22.0 statistical software package, and cross-country comparisons were conducted. The results indicate that, with the exception of Kazakhstan, the majority of students in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey prefer in-person education in accounting.