Instructional strategies and students' performance in accounting : an evaluation of those strategies and the role of gender

This paper investigates the effects of two instructional strategies on accounting students' performance and the gender differences within the strategies. In an experiment, undergraduate students at an Australian university were randomly assigned to either the self-managed or split-attention condition. Participants were required to self-manage graphical and textual presentations in introductory accounting as an alternative to learning by studying instructor-managed materials. Students in the self-managed group were guided on how to integrate spatially separated text and diagrammatic information by moving text as close as possible to associated parts of a diagram. Results indicated significant differences between the two presentation formats. In addition, significant interactions between gender and presentation format were found. Follow-up analysis showed that females benefited by using self-management techniques than males. The gender differences have implications for instructional design, both in the manner in which the text and graphs are structured and in the way information is presented.