Financial Accounting and Reporting Classroom Materials
Financial Accounting and Reporting is an important part of the accounting curriculum. The skills students learn in your classroom will not only prepare them for more advanced courses, but to one day succeed in a career.
The below are supplemental curriculum resources that the AICPA Academics team have reviewed and think can be used in the classroom.
Award-Winning Curricula
The Academics team is proud to offer award-winning curricula designed to encourage faculty and expand the knowledge of accounting students. The curricula below is from the Accounting Professors Curriculum Resource tool and has been recognized for excellence with the Bea Sanders/AICPA Innovation and Teaching Award, the George Krull/Grant Thornton AAA Innovation in Junior and Senior-Level Teaching Award, or the Mark Chain/FSA Innovation in Graduate Teaching Award.
- A Better Way to Teach Effective Interest Method Related Problems in Accounting
This resource presents a simpler method of teach accounting problems involving the use of the effective interest method. The method stimulates student interest by focusing on the economics of the transaction and relating it to real-life examples. - Accounting in the Headlines: A News Blog for the Introductory Accounting Classroom
This resource shares Wendy Tietz's "Accounting in the Headlines" blog in which she writes stories about real-life companies and events that can be used in the accounting classroom to illustrate introductory financial and managerial accounting concepts. - Accounting Challenge (ACE): Mobile-Gaming App for Learning Accounting
Accounting Challenge is the first mobile-gaming app for teaching financial accounting. ACE aims to enhance learning of accounting outside the classroom by engaging students to play and learn accounting on the go. - A FASB Accounting Standards Codification Project for Introductory Financial Accounting
This exercise is designed as a team project in which introductory accounting students act as a consultants to a client seeking guidance on issues surrounding a start-up venture. Students must access and cite the Codification as the basis for the materials they submit in fulfillment of the project requirements. - Attracting the Best and Brightest to Accounting: Establishing an Honors Accounting Course
This resource presents one school's approach to attracting and recruiting the best and brightest students toward accounting by offering an honors accounting course. - Beyond Debits and Credits... Service Learning in Accounting
This resource presents a service learning project implemented in two accounting courses to enhance student skills in communication and teamwork. - Business From the Idea to the Seasoned Offering: Accounting and Financial Statements Reflecting Business Activities
This project takes accounting education from bookkeeping to holistic active business learning including how financial statements build to reflect the business. - Chocolate: Accounting as a First year Seminar
This resource provides a thematic approach at combining first year seminars and accounting programs using student activities that are simultaneously engaging and assessable. - Creative Strategies for Teaching MBA Level Accounting
This resource presents a new concept for teaching accounting to MBA level students. At its heart, accounting centers on measurement of historical transactions or the measurement of future opportunities. this course turns the focus from rules, to the tools leaders need to manage a complex organization. - Cultivating Deep Learning in the Principles of Accounting Classes through Philanthropy-Based Education
This philanthropy project goes beyond service learning or volunteerism. Students make real decisions that have immediate impacts on their community. Students award funding to not-for-profit agencies based on a competitive proposal process. - Digital Storytelling for Engaged Student Learning
This resource uses digital story telling, a movie, to enhance students' technical competence in accounting. The story uses 12 episodes to follow three young business graduates who started their own business and discover along the way the role of financial information in managing a business venture. - FASB Accounting Standards Codification: Student-Authored Research Exercises
This resource is based on the notion that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Students in a financial accounting graduate class demonstrate their master of GAAP research skills by creating research assignments using the FASB Accounting Standards Codification. - Forming Groups in the Age of YouTube
This resource uses a variation of speed dating as a means for forming groups in an introductory accounting class. By learning more about their classmates prior to self-selecting a group this method allows students to choose better groups. - Getting Started in the Throughbred Horse Business: A Review of Some Basic Accounting Principles
This resource provides reinforcement of common accrual accounting concepts centered on the breeding and racing operations of a small thoroughbred horse business. This curriculum is appropriate to use after students have been exposed to fixed assets, inventory, profit and loss and cash flow reporting. - IFRS Immersion
This resource provides instructions for teaching an IFRS course from the standpoint of foreign companies that have already dealt with the problems and issues associated with converting from local GAAP to international GAAP. - IFRS Projects Using Dual Reporting of IFRS and U.S. GAAP
This resource illustrates integrating IFRS learning into financial accounting curricula by incorporating valuable contrasting information from the dual reporting. - Integrated Accounting Principles: A New Approach to Traditional Accounting Principles Courses
This resource describes an integrated accounting principles course that combines traditional financial and managerial accounting courses into a single six hour course. - Introducing Freshmen Students in the Accounting/Finance Course to the Library
This resource describes a series of online, interactive tutorials and quizzes to help students learn fundamental concepts and skills of company and industry related research. - Introduction to Financial Accounting Case Project: Arctic Blast Ice Cream Store
This case provides an opportunity for students to apply accounting concepts to a simple business venture. The project lasts 4-6 weeks and covers three distinct phases of the management process: business decision making, performance and evaluation. - Let's Go to the Movies: Using Movies as an Ethics Assignment
This project involves students watching a series of predetermined movies and noting the ethical dilemma. At the end of the semester each student must defend one of the movies as a nominee for "A Must See Ethics Movie" for accounting/business students. - Mini-responsibility Centers: A Strategy for Learning by Leading
This resource explains the concept of using mini-responsibility centers (MRCs) to decentralize large financial, managerial and cost accounting courses. In return the students are more focused and engaged. - Modeling Uncertainty in C-V-P Assignments: Going Beyond the Basics!
This resource provides an outline for using the Monte Carlo Simulation to offer graduate students an opportunity to rapidly come to insights about probabilistic model building and interpretation. The simulation combines quantitative skills and qualitative skills along with reports and presentations. - Northwind Data Query Exercise
This project encourages students to consider the evolution of data sources for financial reporting and evaluate how to acquire and manipulate information in this emerging business reality; by actually practicing queries and exporting information to worksheets. - Reinventing Student Engagement and Collaboration within Introductory Accounting Courses
This resource provides ideas for increasing engagement and collaboration in the introductory accounting class. Examples include student projects, flipped classroom applications and in-class problems. - Responsibilities and Choices: An Active Engagement Exercise for Introductory Accounting Courses
This exercise provides students with an opportunity to perform a basic due diligence task, complete a relatively simple working paper to document their work and make a decision. The exercise has embedded moral temptation and ethical issues and examines ethical choices that students make in the presence of time pressure and reward structures that encourage aggressive performance. - TeachingIFRS.com
This document provides information on TeachingIFRS.com which was created in response to the rapid growth of IFRS and lack of high quality and effective teaching resources. The site consolidates and provides links to numerous freely available IFRS pedagogical materials. - Testing Critical Thinking Skills in Accounting Principles
This resource describes a method for testing critical thinking skills in an accounting principles course. Using this method, each testing period is divided into two parts. First, students complete an individual traditional test. The second part is a critical thinking exercise called "the challenge problem". - The Accounting Profession Post Sarbanes-Oxley: An Approach to Impart Knowledge About the Conceptual Framework and Attract Students to the Accounting Major
This document provides the description of a program entitled "The Accounting Profession Post Sarbanes-Oxley". The program provides students with an opportunity to better understand important elements of the conceptual framework. It also provides an overview of the career opportunities in accounting. - The Accounting Tournament - March Madness in Financial Accounting
This resource describes implementation of an end of year comprehensive review using brackets as a model. Students are randomly placed in the bracket and compete against each other for extra credit points. - The Amazing Accounting Race: An Introductory Accounting Semester Project
This project engages students with an exciting internet race around the professional world of accounting. Students obtain clues to complete tasks, encounter detours, road blocks and fast forwards. The assignments utilize students' synthesis skills and computer application skills as they collect facts about accounting careers from the internet and assemble data in an organized format. - The College to Professional Experience
This resource outlines a program that serves to better prepare students for the "real world" by changing the perception of education from "learning by doing" to "doing and making to learn with technology". The project aims to move beyond traditional models of education to leverage technology to facilitate new methods of delivery and understanding. - The Farming Game and the Introductory Financial Accounting Course: An Accounting Simulation
The Farming Game enables students to develop many of the skill-based competencies needed by students entering the accounting profession, regardless of career path. The Game provides experiential learning of various accounting principles. It is a learning opportunity that offers students a degree of reality and a larger view of the system. - Understand FX Risk by Playing Monopoly
This resource uses a short version of Monopoly to understand the FX risk impact on net income. - Back to the Future: Using Accounting History to Explore Professional Opportunities
In this project students read an article about a period of time in accounting history and present their findings to the class in a video format. Students then tie what they have learned in the presentations to the field of accounting today as well as the future. - From Pacioli to Picasso: Using Art to Enhance Critical Thinking in Accounting Capstone Courses
This resource outlines using name cards, picture drawings and classic artwork to help students enhance their critical thinking skills. The exercise sets the tone for a course that requires them to think about more than rules and regulations and instead delve into the "why" and "what could be." - Digging Deep: Using Forensic Analytics as a Context to Teach Microsoft Excel and Access
This resource describes a graduate level case that focuses on the development of technology skills through the lens of forensic analysis. - Who Moved My Classroom? Community Linked Learning and Assessment
This resource describes three exercises that expand learning beyond the classroom. The first exercise allows students to discover the linkage between classroom studies and what practitioners do in the "real world". The second allows students to apply the COSO model to internal controls. The third requires students to interpret financial statements for a friend.
Additional Materials
Here are additional materials we reviewed and think are useful to incorporate into the classroom.
- IIRC Database of Research on Integrated Reporting
The International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) launched the <IR> Academic Database, a searchable collection of more than 200 articles, books, chapters, dissertations, and other pieces of scholarly research on the advancement, adoption, and practice of integrated reporting.
- A destination is only as good as its compass. The new My 360 is here to help you create a free plan personalized to your financial needs by helping guide you through all the resources 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy has to offer.
