AICPA honors innovative professors

The American Institute of CPAs announced the recipients of its Effective Learning Strategies Awards: Dr. Karen Braun; Dr. Sandria Stephenson; and Dr. Charles Leflar, Katie Terrell and JaLynn Thomas.

The annual ELS Awards are given to educators who use innovative teaching practices and curricula.
“These accounting professors are developing exciting, ground-breaking teaching models to educate and inspire the next generation of accounting professionals,” said Joanne Fiore, AICPA vice president of professional media, academic and student engagement in a statement. “These awards honor all the educators who are bringing to life what is challenging and engaging about a career in accounting for our future CPAs and CGMAs.”

At the introductory level, Dr. Braun, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, received the 2016 Bea Sanders/AICPA Innovation in Teaching Award for her “Excel-Based Active-Learning for the Managerial Accounting Course.” The course uses Excel-based projects to help students apply managerial accounting concepts to business issues.

Case-Western-Reserve-campus

In the same category, Kelvie Crabb, a lecturer at The University of Kansas; Gail Hoover King, a professor at Purdue University Northwest; and Dr. Kimberly Swanson Church, an assistant professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, received an honorable mention for their submission, “Launch Learning: Students Create, Collaborate…and Comprehend Managerial Accounting!”

At the junior- and senior-level, Dr. Stephenson, an assistant professor of accounting at Kennesaw State University, received the 2016 George Krull/Grant Thornton Teaching Innovation Award for her “Reflective Ethical Decision: A model for ethics in accounting education,” which uses the underpinnings of philosophical humanism in collaboration with self-directed learning to help students determine and design their own personal model construct of ethical values.

Tracie Miller-Nobles, an associate professor at Austin Community College, received an honorable mention for her submission, “Utilizing Concept Mapping in Individual Income Tax.”

At the graduate level, the winners of the 2016 Mark Chain/FSA Teaching Innovation Award were a team from the Sam Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas: Dr. Leflar, a clinical professor, instructor Katie Terrell, and lecturer JaLynn Thomas. They won for “Interviewing for Requirements in the Advanced AIS Classroom,” in which students are taught how to consider business goals, as well as analyze specific processes and the needs of future users, when designing accounting information systems.

Cassy Budd, a teaching professor at Brigham Young University, received an honorable mention in the same category for her submission, “Case Method Teaching in a Graduate Class: Setting the Stage for Success.”

Each winner or team of winners will receive $2,500 and a plaque from the sponsors – the AICPA, the Federation of Schools of Accountancy, and Top 6 Firm Grant Thornton -- as well as an opportunity to present their curricula at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Accounting Association. The curricula will also be included in the AICPA’s Accounting Professors' Curriculum Resource.

For more information about the AICPA educator awards, including submission criteria, visit the insitute’s Web site.

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