DEGREE OF SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL ACCOUNTING CURRICULUM IMPLEMENTATION IN GHANA: RELEVANT AND PROBLEMATIC TOPICS

Abstract

This study explored the extent to which senior high school accounting curriculum was completed in a school year and the factors that accounted for the noncompletion of desirable portions of the curriculum. Also, topics students and teachers perceived as difficult were examined as teachers indicated their perception of the overall relevance of the curriculum for students’ development. Overall, 27 teachers and 321 students were drawn at random from the population of senior high school accounting teachers and students in the Central Region of Ghana. The respondents completed two different sets of questionnaires (one for accounting teachers; the other for accounting students) which contained open-ended and closed-ended items. Data was analysed into themes and frequencies and percentages. The study found that teachers perceived senior high school accounting curriculum to be relevant for students’ development and a high degree of the curriculum was completed in a school year. However, limited school time, inadequate teaching and learning resources, overloaded syllabus, and students’ engagement in numerous co-curricular activities impeded the completion of the curriculum. Furthermore, teachers had difficulty in teaching some topics for reasons of abstraction, complexity and technicality in those topics. Students’ difficulty in learning some topics were attributed to teachers’ inability to meet students’ needs and understanding. It is recommended that the Ghana Education Service (GES) organises appropriate continuous professional development programmes to capacitate teachers to competently teach all topics in the curriculum.