The impact of general education in enhancing the self-efficacy of accounting students at universities of technology

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the integration of General Education in improving the Selfefficacy of Cost and Management Accounting (CMA) students to assess whether Self-efficacy, is having any positive impact on the students' academic performance. The research design of this article was descriptive, longitudinal and employed a mixed-method approach. The nature of the quasi-experimental approach that was used in the current article is a non-equivalent pre-test and post-test control group design. The target population was CMA students. A census survey was performed. Findings, which were analysed with the aid of descriptive statistics, indicate a significant correlation in the post-test (Self-efficacy) scores of the group that undertook the General Education Modules and not the group that did not undertake the General Education Modules. This article recommends the implementation of General Education skills into the curriculum and a General Education intervention strategy. Moreover, these skills appear to be very poor amongst current learners and respondents believed that Self-efficacy could have a positive effect on the academic performance of learners.

First-year Accounting students’ confidence levels during Covid-19: Evidence over a period of two years at a South African university

“…Prior international and local studies investigated different factors that could influence students' academic success, such as, students' personality and adaptation to higher education (Papageorgiou and Callaghan 2018;Ahinful et al 2019), academic self-efficacy, the role of gender and academic year experience (Sachitra and Bandara 2017;Naidoo and Govender 2021), self-efficacy and academic success among gender (Buchanan and Selmon 2008;Interiano-Shiverdecker et al 2021), effects of students' stress and burnout (Mansor et al 2020), finance and transport (Matsolo, Ningpuanyeh, and Susuman 2016), and career choice (Umar and Bello 2019). Howvere, little is known of students' confidence levels when higher education was disrupted due to the Covid-19 pandemic when classes moved from F2F to online (Dill et al 2020;Márquez-Ramos 2021).…”