Utilization of the Small Group Approach to Teaching Intermediate Accounting.

Abstract The article discusses the utilization of the small group approach to teaching intermediate accounting. Except for questions and answers between the professor and a particular student, there is a minimum of interaction among students in the classroom. Recognizing the apparent weakness in such a process and the increasing need of society for skills of the accountant who can work independently, the authors modified the traditional approach to the teaching of intermediate accounting into a small-group approach ("the nontraditional method"). The experiment was conducted in an open-enrollment institution- the Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York. The objectives of the study were to develop different methods for teaching accounting to undergraduate students of diverse prior educational preparation so that they can obtain a more meaningful understanding of the subject; to demonstrate the application of small group models of teaching to other teachers in a largely tradition-bound subject area; and to compare the results of the two different teaching methodologies.