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Preferences for Team Learning and Lecture-Based Learning Among First-Year Undergraduate Accounting Students

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Abstract

This study investigates students’ preference for team learning and its effectiveness, compared to lecture-based learning. A quasi-experiment was set up in a financial accounting course in the first-year undergraduate of the Economics and Business Administration Program, where students had to choose between one of the two learning methods (team learning or lecture-based) and subsequently followed their preferred method of pedagogy. The quasi-experiment was administered for a first-year undergraduate class, with data for 291 students. The first objective of this study is to investigate students’ preference in relation to their gender, ability, motivation, and learning strategy. The second objective is to explore whether a team-based approach is more effective than lecture-based learning, when students participate in their preferred method. The results show that female students had a higher preference for team learning than male students. Furthermore, students with a preference for team learning had a lower ability level, were more intrinsically motivated, had less control of their learning beliefs, were more help seeking, and were more willing to share their knowledge with peers. The team learning approach resulted in increased performance, compared to the lecture-based setting, while controlling for differences in gender and ability. This beneficial impact of team learning on performance was not found for other courses (in which team learning was not implemented), leading to the conclusion that team learning offers an appropriate learning method at the university level for a first-year course. Implications for student learning, faculty members, and institutional policy are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Following Huber (1991), team learning includes the processes of information acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, convergent thinking and information storage for future use.

  2. To the authors knowledge, learning preferences in combination with ability were not studied in a university setting before.

  3. Ghent is situated in the northern part of Belgium and is the second largest university of Belgium. In Belgium, higher education is completely publicly financed with negligible tuition fees (about 750 dollar). In addition, access to higher education is open in Belgium, and there are no formal selection procedures or admission tests; a secondary education diploma is required and sufficient to enroll at the first undergraduate year (Duchesne and Nonneman 1998). As a result of these lenient policies, a high percentage of students (about 25 %) must repeat their entire first undergraduate year. For more information about higher education in Belgium, see Duchesne and Nonneman (1998).

  4. In Belgium, teaching assistants are part of the faculty of the University and have at least a master degree.

  5. An oblique rotation (which allows correlation between factors) was also performed and resulted in similar factors and factor loadings.

  6. If we do not delete these items, the main results remain unchanged.

  7. IF we include all four items, we get the same significant results (p = .000 for the t test and p = .001 for the ANCOVA).

  8. We also asked the lecture-based learners, whether they still preferred lecture-based learning and similarly approximately 85 % answered positive.

  9. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for providing this idea.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Accounting and Corporate Finance, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Sint-Pietersplein 7, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Evelien Opdecam & Patricia Everaert

  2. Department of Education, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Hilde Van Keer

  3. Education Quality Control Unit, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Tweekerkenstraat 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Fanny Buysschaert

Authors
  1. Evelien Opdecam
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  2. Patricia Everaert
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  3. Hilde Van Keer
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  4. Fanny Buysschaert
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Correspondence to Evelien Opdecam.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 7.

Table 7 Reliability measures for the MSLQ: motivation subscales
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Appendix 2

See Table 8.

Table 8 Reliability measures for the MSLQ: Learning Strategies subscales
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Opdecam, E., Everaert, P., Van Keer, H. et al. Preferences for Team Learning and Lecture-Based Learning Among First-Year Undergraduate Accounting Students. Res High Educ 55, 400–432 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-013-9315-6

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