Application of Contextual Teaching and Learning model through Interdisciplinary Student Projects – An approach to enhancing Accounting and IT skills

Effective application of contextual learning can be facilitated by providing opportunity to students to use the knowledge in concept learnt, to solve certain problems within a ‘context’. To improve student engagement in quantitative based course like Math, Accounting or Science; it is of supreme importance that students are able to make connections between knowledge and its application to a real world context. Two such cases of Contextual Learning have been presented in this paper which was modeled in implementation of interdisciplinary projects across Accounting and IT disciplines, with Business students enrolled in Managerial Accounting and Cost Accounting courses and CIS students in Mobile Application course and ICT. This study aims at presenting a contextual strategy used to enhance Accounting and IT skills in Undergraduate students at Dubai Women’s College, Higher Colleges of Technology. We posited that through this contextualized approach, students would see Accounting, Computational thinking and app development as tools for solving work-related problems. Using Constructivist teaching and REACT (relating, experience, application, collaboration and transfer) strategy; we initiated curriculum integration of both Accounting and IT, which deviates from traditional teaching model where learning of a subjects is isolated from any context. We conclude that the interdisciplinary projects implemented were a robust technique for application of contextual learning. The most important outcome was achieving the highest level in bloom’s taxonomy and that is to ‘create’.