Effects of innovative teaching methods on students’ academic performance: An empirical study on financial accounting

Abstract

The implementation in Spain of the European Higher Education Area has involved a substantial change in traditional practices of university education, introducing important modifications both to the teaching methodology and the evaluation criteria.

The objective of this work is to determine whether there is a relationship between the methodology and the evaluation scheme used and the results obtained by the students, differentiating academic years in which different methodologies were applied within the framework of the ECTS philosophy. To this aim this work focuses on the results achieved for the Financial Accounting subject, located in the first course of the Management and Business Administration degree. Firstly, a depiction of its electronic guide is undertaken, showing the teaching methodology followed for the subject. Afterwards, the results of the research are displayed, analyzing the relationships between the applied methodology and the marks achieved by the use of contingency tables and Pearson’s chi-square tests.