A Study on the Effects of Accounting Work Integrated Learning to the Personal Efficacy of 4th Year and 5th Year Students

...

Jackson (2015) examines how work-integrated learning (WIL) influences career choice status among undergraduates. Career choice status has documented effects on well-being, career satisfaction, career success and, more broadly, organisational performance. Quantitative ratings gauge undergraduate satisfaction with their career choices and structured reflections explore how WIL influenced choices. Findings indicate career choice status is relatively strong among those who have completed WIL as part of their academic studies, more specifically a work placement in their degree specialisation. The placement experience influenced career choice status in four ways: provision of professional networking and expanded career choice opportunities; information and insight into one’s intended career; assistance with the decision-making process on precisely which career to pursue; and identification of strategies to pursue one’s targeted profession. The study develops our understanding of WIL’s contribution to career management and how educators and professional practitioners can encourage informed career choice among undergraduates on work placement.

The author contends in this article that work-based learning is the most advantageous method to prepare people to assume mutual responsibility for leadership and management. The reason is that leadership in the current knowledge era is less frequently produced from a single individual; rather, the author claims that it now occurs more often as a dynamic practice that is distributed across a range of individuals. Compared to traditional classroom learning often delivered in off-site settings, work-based learning summons participants to live engagements during which they can reflect on their experience so as to expand and create knowledge while at the same time improve their practice. Accordingly, they develop particular habits and attitudes that give rise to an adoption and appreciation of leadership as a collective practice. (Raelin, 2016)

A model of work-related learning based on intentionality and developmental relatedness is proposed here. A shift is called for from an educational perspective on work-related learning to a noneducational perspective in which learning is construed as largely implicit and spontaneous. That is, work-related learning can happen both deliberately and spontaneously as direct or indirect result of work-related interactions. Work-related learning often occurs in messy real-life situations, is influenced by various power and social relations, and results in individual learning outcomes as well as shared understandings. The proposed model can help human resource development professionals better understand how learning and work are interrelated. It can also help such professionals take individual and work characteristics more carefully into consideration. (Dornbos et al., 2004)

Personal Efficacy

Burnett, Xu and Kennedy (2010) purpose to assess the extent self efficacy acts as a determinant of performance and how information gained about this link can be used to guide efforts to reform accounting education. To do so, they assess the predictive power of self efficacy on performance in the first Intermediate Accounting course (Intermediate I) in the presence of other demographic and environmental variables. They examine two measures of self efficacy: 1) a student’s perception about his/her skills relative to the accounting cycle; and 2) a student’s expectation about his/her grade in Intermediate I. Results indicate after controlling for other demographic and environmental variables, a student’s perception about his/her skills does not impact first exam performance. In contrast, the perception of the capacity to earn a grade based on a summative analysis of self-awareness, knowledge and motivation is significantly associated with ftest performance. These confounding results indicate students’ perception of ability is not always accurate while grade perception plays a significant role in performance. These results lead us to infer that efforts to reform Intermediate I could benefit from gathering more information about student perceptions (which proves to be useful in developing the curriculum of the course).

Komarraju, Swanson, and Nadler (2014) assessed the effectiveness of a career in psychology course in increasing students’ career decision self-efficacy, and the role of increased career decision self-efficacy in predicting motivation as well as course, and major satisfaction. Students completed assignments involving career self-exploration, planning future semesters, resume creation, job search, interviewing a professional in the field, exploring subfields, visiting a research lab, and internship opportunities. In Study 1, paired-sample t-tests for 79 students revealed significant increases in career decision self-efficacy. In Study 2, at pretest and posttest, 226 students completed measures of career decision self-efficacy, self-determined motivation, career information, course, and major satisfaction. Regression analyses indicated that career self-efficacy explained significant variance in self-determined motivation, course, and major satisfaction. Further, perceived gains in career information mediated the relationship between increased career self-efficacy and self-determined motivation, course, and major satisfaction. Finally, assignments providing concrete professional experiences predicted increases in career self-efficacy.

This study examined the role of acculturation to the host culture, acculturation to the home culture, and dispositional hope in career decision self-efficacy (CDSE) in a sample of 213 Korean international undergraduate students enrolled in U.S. universities. The findings revealed that hope and acculturation to the host culture uniquely and positively predicted CDSE. Acculturation to the home culture was positively related to CDSE but did not account for unique variance in CDSE beyond that accounted for by hope. Hope was the strongest predictor of CDSE. As expected, acculturation to the host culture and acculturation to the home culture were not significantly related, suggesting that one does not necessarily require sacrifice of the other. No interaction effects were found between hope and acculturation variables on CDSE. Limitations of this study and implications for future research and practice are discussed. (In, 2016)

Yu-Lin (2015) has two central purposes: First, it examines not only the roles of gender and persistence in undergraduate computing majors’ learning self-efficacy, computer self-efficacy, and programming self-efficacy but also Bandura’s hypothesized sources of self-efficacy; second, it examines the influence of sources of efficacy on the three aforementioned self-efficacy beliefs