Enhancing accounting students’ ethical cognition in AI audit education: A multimodal sandwich approach (MSA)

This study evaluates the impact on students’ ethical cognition after attending a course on auditing, emphasizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a pedagogy based on the Multimodal Sandwich Approach (MSA), incorporating practitioner narratives, academic readings, group discussion and case study analysis. Data was collected from a survey administered to 160 final year accounting students in a pre-test/post-test design grounded in Rest’s (1986. Moral development: Advances in research and theory. Praeger) Four-Component Model (FCM) — moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral character. The results indicate a significant improvement in ethical cognition across all four ethical dimensions of the FCM. The findings empirically validate the MSA in enhancing accounting students’ ethical cognition in an AI-infused auditing course. The results have implications for universities, accrediting authorities and regulatory bodies to integrate MSA into the auditing curricula, addressing ethical concerns within AI-audit guidelines. Future research is suggested to examine the longitudinal impacts and cross-contextual applicability of MSA.