Give One a Fish or Teach One to Fish: An Exploration on Intra-Entity Transfers

Abstract

Advanced accounting covers a series of challenging topics including business combination and financial statement consolidation. Students in advanced accounting class often have a hard time understanding the consolidation journal entries for intra-entity transfers. We develop an innovative “do-it-yourself” approach to teaching this difficult topic. To corroborate the effectiveness of this new approach relative to the traditional method, we randomize these two approaches in different sections and collect data from both samples, including grades on a quiz on intra-entity transfers and responses in an end-of-class survey. Both the quiz performance and survey feedback indicate that this new approach to teaching consolidation journal entries for intra-entity transfer is more effective than the traditional method demonstrated in current textbooks.