Accounting ethics education increasingly emphasises authentic experiential learning that enables students to engage with ethical issues in realistic professional contexts. While simulations and internships are widely used, short-term, high-intensity experiences that expose students to legal accountability remain underexplored. This study examines accounting students’ affective, cognitive, and behavioural reflections after attending a court hearing involving an accounting-related fraud case. Drawing on Kolb’s experiential learning cycle and Wilson and Beard’s stimulus-based reflection model, we analyse affective, cognitive, and behavioural reflections captured through an immediate open-ended survey of 95 students at a Chinese university. The findings show a coherent experiential learning process: students reported strong affective responses, followed by cognitive re-framing of professional responsibility, internal controls, and ethics education, and culminating in behavioural intentions to resist unethical pressure and seek support. The study provides evidence that court hearings can be a feasible experiential learning intervention that integrates technical accounting knowledge with ethical judgement and broadens pedagogical approaches in accounting ethics education.
Chen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.