Closing the Loop: A Strategy to Improve Students’ Writing Skills in an Accounting Class

By Donna Dolansky

I’ve been teaching ACC 401 every spring term since I started at Utica College three years ago.  In this course, we assess students’ communication skills (oral and written) with the expectation that they will be performing at the proficiency-level.   Our target is that 100% of students will achieve 80% or higher on a final paper scored using a rubric.

The first year I taught the course (Spring 2017), 87% of students achieved the target and 13% did not.  At the same time, I was serving on a search committee for a biology faculty member, and Larry Aaronson, another committee member, mentioned to me that he assigns a novel each year in his biology class and asks students to blog about the book.  He added that he wrote a paper about how this improved their ability to communicate in writing.

I thought this was a great idea, so in the Spring 2018 semester, I assigned a novel related to auditing and asked students to write responses to a series of questions I raised about the reading.  I also asked them to write any general observations they had about the book.  This provided me with an opportunity to review students’ writing and offer feedback on a low stakes assignment.

The results?  Students’ writing slightly improved, and, more importantly, students believed that they benefitted from the experience. When asked whether or not they found the assignment useful, the majority of students responded affirmatively, saying they found the reading beneficial and their writing skills improved.  Further, students credited the assignment with developing their critical thinking abilities. 

A number of students acknowledged the importance of reading and writing in “real life work,” and so they perceived this assignment as helping them develop essential skills for today’s professional workforce. 

In the words of one student, “When we were first told of the assignment I was worried I would dread having to read the book because I thought it was going to be boring. I enjoyed this book so much however, that I have recommended it to many of the people I work