Sink or Skim: Textbook Reading Behaviors of Introductory Accounting Students

Despite the significant emphasis that most instructors place on textbooks in introductory accounting courses, little research exists to describe how students interact with their textbooks. Using learning journals, 172 undergraduate students provided detailed, real-time accounts of their experiences with 13 chapters of an introductory financial accounting textbook. Using the method of grounded theory, supplemented with quantitative tests of association, this study begins to characterize textbook use from a student perspective. Results indicate that, for students, reading is a motivated behavior, with the specific motives varying across different groups of students and leading to different consequential actions. Academically strong students appear to read with the primary goal of understanding assigned material, as evidenced by their willingness to (a) engage in reading before the related material is covered in class, (b) persist when material becomes difficult, and (c) establish defined action plans that promptly resolve confusion. In contrast, weaker students appear to read with the primary goal of reducing anxiety, by deferring reading and terminating it when comprehension becomes difficult. The findings of this study are used to create instructional guidance that instructors can provide to students and to direct future research by outlining important and interesting questions requiring further investigation. Sink or Skim: Textbook Reading Behaviors of Introductory Accounting Students When you were a student in your first accounting class, did you ever count how many pages were left in the textbook chapter while doing the assigned reading? Did you ever read the textbook while working at a part-time job? Did you ever put off the assigned reading because you thought it would be more effective to complete just before the exam? Understanding how students read textbooks is of critical importance to instructors because educational researchers have observed that higher education institutions rely extensively on textbooks (McFall 2005). Textbooks aim to communicate the content, beliefs, values, and methods of a discipline (Richardson 2002), and influence the structure of courses and knowledge that is built within a particular field (Issitt 2004). A significant barrier that might thwart these goals is that students may not use textbooks in the way they were intended. The existing published research offers little insight into such issues because few empirical studies describe college textbook use (Bessler et al. 1999). The purpose of this study is to develop a multidimensional characterization of how students use their textbooks, so that we can begin to determine whether students’ reading behaviors are likely to prevent textbooks from achieving their intended goals. Several authors have developed normative standards regarding how students should read textbooks. Allen (1999) recommends students preview a chapter to set out a reading purpose, monitor their reading to keep their focus on that purpose, and periodically evaluate how much they are learning. To this process, Barnett (1998) adds the task of revising reading strategies based on self-evaluation and external feedback. In contrast to this reasoned approach, the scant empirical evidence suggests that most students are passive readers who fail to use active strategies (McFall 2005) even when trained to do so through a reading skills workshop (Barnett 1998). Furthermore, reading strategies differ by discipline; 70% of students surveyed in an

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