This guest post is part of a series linked to the publication of G. Pleschova & A. Simon (eds.) Learning to teach in central Europe: Reflections from early career researchers. This post comes from Carolina Curvale.
Petra Srnisova documents in her study the results of the implementation of constructive alignment and active learning methods in an Accounting course at the University of Economics in Bratislava. Her motivation for incorporating teaching innovation to her course emerged from an observation to which, I think, a good number of educators can relate to. She acknowledged that students’ field of study tends to be related to the level of interest in a specific course. In her case, Commerce students appeared to be less worried than other students in minute details that are essential to Accounting.
The author cleverly included strategies to promote student engagement in applying theory to practice in three sessions that took place in between a first and a second assessment. The innovated sessions introduced post-it, group work, and pair work activities aimed at promoting problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaborative work. The skills practiced during the sessions were expected to engage students and help them improve their performance in the assessments. The results of the study reveal that the exercise was more fruitful in achieving the second of these goals.
In regard to performance, the author compared the student scores before (first assessment) and after teaching innovation (second assessment). The student scores indeed improved from an average of 64% to 76%. A course taught the prior year, without innovation, showed that from the first to the second assessment students also improved, but much less (only 2 percent points). These results encourage innovation of teaching in order to improve student performance, although it would be interesting to control groups by their overall grade scores. In my opinion, this is a very important result that may also contribute to achieving better engagement, as students who perform better may be more prone to participate in class.
The author could not conclude based on collected data that the teaching innovation produced the expected effect, that is, that active learning techniques promote student engagement. While the survey questions measuring student interest before and after the course reveal no change, on average students reported that they did pay attention to classes. The qualitative data gathered from the instructor’s notes and from an external observer provide contrasting information: the instructor perceived more engagement during the innovation sessions while the observer did not register heightened participation, although the observer attended only one session and could not fully compare the group’s performance.
The chapter systematically documents the results of the adoption of teaching innovation aimed at improving both student interest and performance in an Accounting course. While the results are mixed, the experience is flawlessly analyzed and presented, and the author herself offers avenues for improving the experience in the future. In my view, the chapter offers interesting and practical ideas on how to improve the teaching-learning experience when the topic of the course is not directly related to the students major – something we can all learn from!