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SMEs project: a method to encourage interpersonal skills among pre-service accountant

Gaffar Hafiz Sagala (Faculty of Economics, Universitas Negeri Medan, Medan, Indonesia)
Tri Effiyanti (Faculty of Economics, Universitas Negeri Medan, Medan, Indonesia)

Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education

ISSN: 2050-7003

Article publication date: 19 December 2019

Issue publication date: 15 December 2020

251

Abstract

Purpose

Accounting Education Change Commission reveals that accounting professionals are required to have interpersonal skills. For this reason, higher education requires the dynamics of learning that can foster critical thinking skills, analysis, communication, negotiation, cooperation and argumentation. Therefore, studies in the field of accounting education have led to a project approach to provide students with complex learning experiences to develop various supporting skills in addition to learning outcomes. Interestingly, the methods have its own dilemma with social loafing in groups. Therefore, a lecturer must be able to match it with an appropriate evaluation instrument. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of implementing peer evaluations and project-based learning (SMEs project) on improving the interpersonal skills of accounting students.

Design/methodology/approach

The population of this research is Accounting students at Medan State University, while the sample is students who are undergoing Cost Accounting courses taken with purposive sampling. The within-sample of field experiment method was conducted in the current study. Furthermore, data analysis was performed using one-way ANOVA analysis assisted by SPSS 19.

Findings

The results of this study showed that students had an increase in interpersonal skills in their board, and peer-evaluation design resulted in learning satisfaction and fairness in students.

Originality/value

The results of this study produce practical recommendations for lecturers to innovate their learning activities with actual project design and control group dynamics with accommodative evaluation designs. This study provides new insights in building a comprehensive instructional design, so it can strengthen the concept of instructional and evaluation designs which are integral parts that should match between one another.

Keywords

Citation

Sagala, G.H. and Effiyanti, T. (2020), "SMEs project: a method to encourage interpersonal skills among pre-service accountant", Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Vol. 12 No. 5, pp. 883-895. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-04-2019-0097

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited

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