Accounting Students in an Australian University Improve their Writing: But How Did it Happen?

Abstract

The ability to communicate – orally and in writing – is a graduate attribute that employers in many countries rank as number one in importance, aside from relevant qualifications. This paper reports the implementation and evaluation of a collaborative peer assessment and self-assessment learning and teaching (L&T) initiative, which was designed to improve postgraduate students' judgment of writing standards and to improve their own writing – according to that standard. The initiative was embedded in an introductory financial accounting unit in an Australian university. In a mixed methods study, the matched pair design revealed improvements in the written communication skills of students as determined by an independent assessor. There was also statistically significant improvement in the ability of students to apply assessment standards to grammatical, structural and presentation components of written communication. Whereas it was not possible to attribute the improvements entirely to the collaborative peer assessment initiative, our observations and students' self-reporting comments suggest that the L&T initiative was effective.

Key Words:

• Judgment
• written communication
• accounting
• peer assessment
• SPARK^PLUS

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank John Hall, Kaye Haddrill and Eileen Thompson for their valuable input into this paper. We also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments.

Notes

1 More recently, peer assessment is defined as ‘an arrangement for learners to consider and specify the level, value or quality of a product or performance of other equal-status learners' (Topping, 2009, p. 20).

2 Depending upon how the peer assessment is organised, the types of variables that could conceivably cause these benefits to students' learning include level of time spent on task, increased engagement of students, increased practice by students and the fact that there is a greater sense of accountability and responsibility. Additionally, there may be beneficial effects for faculty arising from the requirement for peer assessment to initiate reflection on the objectives of the marking criteria and, more generally, the unit as a whole (Topping et al., 2000, p. 149).

3 A significant proportion of the students have a language other than English as their first language.

4 Systematic random sampling (i.e. every nth student from a random starting point) was applied to a list of the previous year's students. The list was in report grade order, so that a wide range of quality was represented in the sample of ten.

5 Although both of these authors have considerable experience in grading tertiary Accounting work, it is acknowledged that the inherent presumption (which may be challenged) is that experience in grading leads to more reliable judgment.

6 The students were made aware, through a trial run with SPARK^PLUS, that the spectrum is a continuous measure.

7 Every effort was made to remove any indication from the reports as to whether they were draft of final versions. In addition, they were all anonymised and randomised.

8 There were 35 pairs of reports, out of the 40 students. In a few instances the reports were not submitted electronically, and some students failed to provide a draft report.

9 The analysis was a two-part process. The statements were scanned to establish a list of the recurring themes. Then each statement was re-read, and note was taken of whether each of the themes (noticed in step one) occurred in that particular statement.

10 It is not entirely clear if the students meant the self-evaluation process, itself, the exemplar evaluation process, or some combination of the two.

11 At first glance this may appear to contradict the findings from a similar study by Willey and Gardner (2010, pp. 429–443). In their study the highest percentage (37%) of the students reported that ‘discussing the specification marking within the group and then re-marking it collaboratively was the part of the process that improved their understanding and ability the most’. The different result may arise because their survey instrument required the students to identify ‘which (one) part of the process improved their understanding the most’, while the current study asks a similarly worded question three times, enabling the students to rate the various factors more evenly. In addition, the debrief sessions was performed by completely different people.