An analysis of the implications of diversity for students’ first level accounting performance

Abstract The present study investigates the impact of student diversity on performance of first‐year undergraduate accounting students. The paper is motivated by (i) increasing diversity amongst the accounting student cohort because of the trend to internationalise education services in industrialised countries; and (ii) inconsistent and inconclusive prior evidence on the determinants of accounting student performance. The major contribution of the present paper is to provide a theoretical framework from the published educational literature that can explain much of the variation in the findings of prior studies. We employ this framework to develop and test several propositions in relation to students’ prior content and metacognitive knowledge. The results indicate students studying on‐campus significantly outperform students studying by distance education. On average, international students studying on‐campus perform better than domestic students (studying either on‐ or off‐campus), with international students studying off‐campus performing worst of all. Prior high school accounting, tertiary entrance score and motivation (reflected by both major of study and tutorial attendance) also influence student performance.