Student Perceptions of Learning Technologies in Introductory Accounting Courses

The past two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the development and use of various classroom technologies purported to enhance student learning. Accompanying this has been a large volume of studies aimed at assessing the effectiveness of these technologies from a variety of disciplines. This study contributes to this discourse and the accounting education literature in particular by examining student perceptions of the effectiveness of multiple technologies used in an introductory management accounting course. Perceptions of the effectiveness of a traditional textbook were also collected. Students were then asked to compare their experience in this course to that of the prerequisite introductory financial accounting course where no learning technologies were used. This study shows that students perceive practice problems and problem-based lectures to be the most effective learning activities whether they are employed using technology or not. Two learning technologies to be particularly effective – online practice problems/quizzes and video lectures- but all learning technologies tended to support superficial rather than deep learning approaches