Consolidating the student voice using think aloud protocols

This paper reports on the use of Think Aloud Protocols (TAPs) to identify the concepts in consolidated financial statements that students may find difficult to master. Consolidated Financial Statements is a topic taught normally in Intermediate Accounting that is known to pose a challenge to students (Murphy & McCarthy, 2010). In this study, we use TAPs to capture a participant's immediate thoughts while performing tasks related to consolidated financial statements. TAPs offer the opportunity to hear the student's voice in their strategies to solve a question and provide a unique insight into concepts, terminology and parts of the consolidation process that students may experience as troublesome. These insights will be used to develop a future project of an adaptive learning resource to support student mastery of threshold financial accounting concepts. This paper extends our understanding of the use of TAPs in Accounting and the research methodology employed in this paper could be applied to other teaching innovations.