It is not uncommon for up to sixty ethic backgrounds to be represented by students in Australian universities like the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur. Many of these students are the first in their family to attend a university and, because English frequently is their second language, there is a heightened interest in assuring that they leave the university with the conceptual and linguistic skills necessary to successfully compete in an English-speaking labor market. This article reports on an exercise in impromptu oral presentation and role-playing interviews for job applications or promotions. Early evidence indicates that these activities provide valuable learning experiences in cultivating such abilities, in addition to nuturing other management skills also valued by prospective employers. In environments such as those described above there is a need for both student awareness of their cognitive preferences and use of a cognitive model by faculty in course design and teaching.
Cognitive models describe four different information gathering and processing types.
The purpose of this paper is to explain the importance of this cognitive model in a diverse learning environment. This article discusses a field study of Mhlume Sugar Company Limited. The main motivation for the study was to observe, discuss, and learn about Mhlume's activity-based costing system in order to reflect upon some fundamental issues regarding costing and pricing. Watts and Zimmerman, whose book Positive Accounting Theory now is the most standard fare in accounting PhD programs, had a great deal of trouble getting published in the early 1970s. Now, research in accounting must at the very least be highly quantitative, or it simply is not viewed as scholarly by the key players in academia.