An Experiment With a One-Semester Introductory Accounting Course.

This article describes an experiment with the curriculum for the introductory accounting course. A necessary complementary objective was an increase in the students' understanding of balance sheet and the relationships between income measurement, the balance sheet, and the funds statement. A corollary objective was a decrease in the reliance on double-entry bookkeeping as the basic method of teaching accounting concepts. A completed venture model was used first to present the basic concept of income determination. In a completed venture, income and cash flow are easily related. Cash receipts and cash disbursements are familiar ideas to most students. Conventional pedagogy begins by explaining income as a change in wealth, or net worth, an explanation which presumes a rather sophisticated definition for assets and liabilities. The course introduces periodic income determination for an on-going entity by using the ideas introduced in the discussion of a completed venture. Cash flows related to operating transactions serve as the foundation for periodic measurement of income.