Best Practices in Improving Student Performance: Lessons from Introductory Accounting Module

This is an action research that addressed the alarming high failure rate in an introductory accounting module in a private college in the Sultanate of Oman. The profile of the students were taken from the data of the 2nd semester, academic year 2018 – 2019 and compared with 1st semester, academic year 2018 – 2019 after the interventions in the teaching and learning. There were 160 regular and repeater students who were participants during the implementation of the teaching and learning strategies. There were multiple strategies implemented which include group work, peer learning, formative tests, individual monitoring and timely feed forward comments. The module outcomes posed a high drop of failures from 40% to 15%. There was also high percentage increase in the number of module repeaters who passed in their second and third attempts from 49% to 74%. The teaching and learning interventions were positively perceived by the students and the accounting and finance teachers. Although the interventions were successful in a particular cohort, it cannot be conclusive for all the cohorts. There are other factors that need to be considered for a more comprehensive analysis of the students’ academic performance.