Abstract

A high proportion of undergraduate accounting units in the UK are delivered to non-accounting students. While graduates, employers, and returning placement students typically state how useful an understanding of finance is in the workplace, actual undergraduates, especially first years, often find this topic difficult, with a very high failure rate. Understanding the key to a successful pedagogic approach should improve student understanding of finance based topics and directly influence the students’ experience and subsequent success. The aim of this project is to, by gaining understanding of the students’ perceptions, inform the teaching of financial subjects to non-specialist students in the broad leisure-based sectors of sport, hospitality, tourism and events, where frequently the unit’s context relative to the degree is not immediately appreciated by the students. A pedagogic twist to the methodology is that focus groups were undertaken within the students’ Research Methods unit as a form of action learning. Statements drawn from the focus groups were then used as the basis of a longitudinal study of non-specialist student’s attitude to learning about finance units. This session will share qualitative findings of the ‘Crossing the Numbers Barrier’ research and also discuss initial findings of the second, longitudinal, stage of this project.