A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Accounting, business and management
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TWO MAJOR STARTING POINTS
Listening to students
Insights into students’ conceptions are one of the foundations of successful
curriculum development, class teaching and valid assessment methods.
(Ramsden et al., 1993: 304)
One of the features of business education noted above is the diversity in the student
population. Students will bring with them different motivations for, and different
orientations to, the study of business. Some will wish for an all-round business course,
some will already have a particular interest in certain subjects such as accounting,
marketing or human resource management. Thus a lecturer may find that a class is
composed of a variety of students who are predisposed to view their study of a particular
subject in quite distinctive ways. Moreover, while the lecturer may have taken a view
about where a course lies on the for–about spectrum this may differ significantly from the
view taken by some (or all) of the students. Case study 1 addresses this issue. It looks at
how lecturers have ascertained students’ perceptions of the development of skills. In this
case study the unexpected findings provided lecturers with a challenge.
Case study 1: Ascertaining students’ perceptions of skills
development
Skills development
There has been much discussion about the nature of key skills and the ways in
which they may be developed within the curriculum. A key decision is whether
skills development should be addressed separately within the curriculum or
incorporated into modules. However, even if key skills are developed separately,
it is important that students recognise when these skills may be relevant within
individual modules. This case study describes an approach that placed a central
focus on student perceptions of skills development within individual modules.
At the University of the West of England, a working group was established to
design a programme specification describing the skills currently developed within
the accounting and finance degree programme. Having done this, students were
provided with an opportunity to discuss these skills in some depth. They were
asked ‘To what extent has your course helped you in developing these skills?’
The findings of the study were unexpected. Students experienced skill development
as a tacit developmental process, and in some cases it was so tacit that
students did not perceive it as a process of development at all. For example,