How to Integrate Service Learning into the Accounting Classroom

Service learning is not just a way to connect students to their communities and real-world experience; it can also lead to job opportunities. After completing a service-learning project for an accounting firm, one of our students was offered a full-time position with the same firm immediately upon graduation at an above-average salary. It turns out that this isn’t unusual, since students who have real-world experiences have a distinct advantage over students who have only college coursework.

In this article, we’ll discuss research-based best practices for integrating service learning into the accounting classroom—an area where it’s long been underrepresented. Many accounting students have little to no knowledge or experience with experiential learning, and there’s a dearth of research into the experiential opportunities for accounting students in the United States. While some scant accounting examples exist related to service learning in taxation and accounting information systems, no overarching best practices appear to exist that can guide and empower accounting educators to successfully integrate service learning into any accounting course or curricula.

In compiling these best practices, we hope to make it easier for accounting educators to bring service-learning opportunities into their own classrooms. We drew upon not only the existing body of research into service learning, but also our own nearly five decades of collegiate teaching experience.

At a time of substantially declining enrollment across many U.S. higher education institutions and a renewed focus on the costs of attending college, the time and need for service-learning programs, especially in accounting curricula, has never been more apparent. This situation is compounded by employers actively seeking graduates with service-learning experience. Thus, there’s a compelling case for bringing service learning into accounting curricula.

What Is Service Learning?

Service learning is a form of experiential learning that lets students apply the theories and concepts they’re learning in the classroom to a practical, real-world environment. Also referred to as community-based or community-engaged learning, service learning is an innovative approach to teaching that encourages students to engage with their communities—which, in so doing, also helps them meaningfully engage in the curriculum. Though service learning may sound like volunteering, the two aren’t synonymous. Rather, service learning involves students teaching the concepts and content they’ve learned in class to others, especially those working in nonprofit and community-based organizations.

Service learning is a proven methodology that has long been practiced in the K-12 arena, with an array of tangible benefits for students, including improved academic performance and better civic partnership and engagement. In our research, we found that principals of K-12 schools overwhelmingly believe that service-learning yields many positive benefits, including heightened academic achievement, student citizenship, social and personal development, and community-school relationships—themes that come up over and over again in the service-learning literature.

Service learning has in recent years expanded beyond the K-12 realm. In the last decade, we’ve observed the substantial spread of service learning in higher education, as universities promote what’s been termed the “scholarship of engagement”—an attempt to link theory and practice, as well as institutions to their communities. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in schools of business, which are increasingly imbuing their curriculum with a heightened sense of social responsibility and awareness. These programs effectively balance practical relevance with academic rigor in the context of civic responsibility and engagement.

Service learning not only helps connect students and faculty with members of their community, but also offers unique experiential insights and a heightened understanding of problem-solving. In the context of transformative learning, service learning removes the instructor as the foci and central hub of knowledge diffusion and transmission. The instructor instead moves into a facilitator role, as the student assumes the role of knowledge constructor through the medium of external, experiential learning. We believe that higher education is the right place to integrate service learning, an effective teaching tool with multi-pronged benefits, including increased self-belief and self-efficacy. It can also help students build connections to their institutions; students who complete service-learning courses are more likely to stay at the institution, making service learning a viable strategy for improving student retention (which also improves student engagement).

Service Learning Best Practices

To assist accounting students and educators alike, we’ve drawn upon our almost 50 years of combined experience teaching at the collegiate level to create a list of service-learning best practices that accounting educators can use in their own classrooms. For each best practice, we discuss our own observations and experiences from over the years. A list of all the best practices—along with lessons learned—are presented in Table 1.

Table 1: Best Practices – Accounting Service Learning

Define service learning: In our experience, few accounting students are aware of service learning, and fewer still have experience with it. Such a lack of exposure may cause incongruity, confusion, and disagreement among educators and students alike. Because of this, we’ve found it helpful to define service learning explicitly and succinctly when introducing such an initiative (or even beforehand). Making sure that all parties have a clear understanding of service learning paves the way for a more harmonious and unified experience for everyone involved.

Sort students into teams of one, two, or three: When creating teams, we’ve learned that teams of one, two, or three students generally work best. Teams larger than three are often problematic because some students on the team may take advantage of the diffusion of responsibility to avoid tasks or shift responsibilities to other team members. This can cause collective resentment and have a dire impact on team morale, which can hurt collaboration. This best practice is also grounded in research, which notes that team members should be assigned specific responsibilities and expectations relevant to the skills and competencies they bring to the team. Teams of three or fewer ensure all students are actively involved and engaged, and that everyone has diverse and equitable opportunities to participate. To help ensure all students are actively participating, require multiple or concurrent sessions within the service-learning project, with each student taking a turn at being the leader.

Allow students to self-select community partners (within limits): Experience has taught us that when students are arbitrarily assigned community partners in service-learning projects, they’re often disinterested and unmotivated in the work. Random assignments can also lead to a mismatch between the students’ talents and the partner’s needs. This can make these projects less fulfilling than intended for all parties involved, and may even discredit or bring ignominy to the institution. To avoid this, we encourage students to carefully select a community partner whose mission and objectives are aligned with the students’ own goals and interests.

Require a presentation proposal/outline that must be approved: Before students can move forward with a service-learning project, they should be required to present a proposal or outline of their project plan that requires instructor approval to proceed. In our own experiences, we’ve both seen the unfortunate effects of service-learning projects where no concrete action items or deliverables were set forth, and the projects ultimately proved ambiguous, wasteful, and inefficient, with little utility or benefit provided to the community partners. Requiring approval before starting a service-learning project makes all parties feel more prepared and confident, and furthermore helps the instructor preemptively determine if actual service learning will occur.

Require a pre- and post-test: Pre- and post-tests have been proven to be easy and effective methods to document learning and assess how much information students retain. Based on experience, we recommend using pre-tests and post-tests before and after service-learning projects to demonstrate that learning has occurred. Specifically, we recommend using multiple-choice questions with a minimum of four choices for each question. Ideally, each pre- and post-test should have at least 10 questions to ensure spatially diverse learning has occurred for which college credit may be assigned.

Require letters/emails from the sponsoring partner directly to the professor: Something else we’ve learned over the years is the importance of receiving ongoing documentation from students’ community service partners at preset intervals: before the student begins the service-learning project, at least once during the project, and again at completion of the project. Such documentation, which can be in either paper or electronic format, provides documentable evidence to the professor that service learning will indeed occur, is occurring, and has occurred to the satisfaction of all parties.

Depending on the number of students completing service-learning projects in a given semester, it’s unlikely that the professor will be able to attend every student activity and project; thus, prespecified documentation helps ensure, in the professor’s absence, that students are achieving agreed-upon deliverables in a timely and documented manner. We also recommend sending copies of documentation pertaining to successful service-learning projects to senior leadership at the university to help instill and cultivate future support for such initiatives.

Gain the understanding and support of university administration: For service learning to be successful, it needs support from university administration. It’s been our experience that sometimes, in the early stages of service-learning projects, there may be issues related to student engagement, goal mismatches with community partners, lack of objective achievement, and theory-practice gaps that may be reflected in student evaluation of learning scores. While these issues should not be ongoing, university administrators need to be made aware that such issues may arise during the early stages of such programs so they don’t abandon support as soon as these issues occur. Additionally, we firmly believe there is a crucial need for support from college administrators to make sure resources are allocated appropriately and everyone has a shared understanding of the institution’s civic priorities.

Give awards! The final best practice is one of the most important and effective: When a service-learning project is successful, make time to celebrate it. We’ve held various award ceremonies over the years to celebrate student achievement, inviting students and their families, community partners, and college administrators to reflect on the success, efficacy, and social utility of these programs, not to mention the number of educational benefits. We’ve also invited professors who hadn’t piloted such programs in their classes so they could see the benefits and ask questions of professors engaged in such programs.

For accounting educators, using these best practices to bring service learning into the classroom can help foster civic engagement and community service in students, who will experience benefits well beyond the classroom. And it’s not just students who benefit, but their local communities, too. While these programs may sound time-consuming or burdensome to implement, we haven’t found them to require inordinate amounts of faculty time, and campus functions like Career Services can often assist with these efforts.

In our experience, the effort is well worth it. Given the link between service-learning programs and student retention—coupled with the fact that higher education institutions across the United States are currently struggling with low enrollment and retention—offering a diverse range of service-learning experiences to future accountants may help alleviate these problems. We hope you’re now feeling inspired as to how you may be able to implement service-learning programs and activities into your own accounting curricula.