The Extended Logistic Model of Rasch was found to be useful in creating an interval level scale for the Inventory, and for analysing its psychometric properties and conceptual design. It is suggested that the Inventory can be improved conceptually by adding more items relating to attitudes, intentions and behaviour and by adding harder and easier items to target the student measures better.

Fishbein and Ajzen's 1975 Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), updated by Ajzen and Fishbein in 1980, is advanced in this paper as an appropriate theory for measuring student's intentions to adopt deep or surface processing and to adopt specific learning strategies. TRA is a decision theory that explains motivation by emphasising the specific processes that individuals use to make choices. TRA captures an individual's motivation by using the concept of intention to perform a behaviour. A TRA model was constructed based on a four‐latent‐variable (deep, surface, strategic and intention) framework and empirically assessed for model data fit. The survey items showed loadings on the constructs of deep, surface and strategic processing under this framework, indicating strong construct validity for the three learning factors. The TRA model was found to strongly positively influence the adoption of the deep processing construct, and to strongly negatively influence the adoption of the surface processing construct. In addition, it was found to strongly positively influence the adoption of positive learning strategies and weakly discourage the use of negative learning strategies.

A proposal to extend existing three year accounting degrees at universities in Australia to four years, proposed and supported by the accounting profession of Australia, is controversial. The Australian government will not pay for a fourth year and there is public criticism of the training of accountants. This study investigates the attitudes, feelings and behaviour intentions of 583 practitioner accountants in Perth, Western Australia, and their views about three important aspects of the proposed change. It shows that practitioner accountants belonging to the profession are split about the value of implementing the change.Accounting, Change, University, Education,