Exploring Attitude, Difficulty and Subjective Norms of Non-Major Undergraduates in Learning Accounting Principles: Ways Forward

Accounting course is offered by numerous non-major accounting programs in higher education institutions all over the world. Hence, the first objective of this paper is to explore attitude, difficulty and subjective norms of non-major accounting undergraduates in one of the public universities in Sarawak, Malaysia. The second objective is to explore ways of improvements in learning the accounting course by non-major undergraduates. A modified questionnaire was distributed in Semester March 2024. More than 40% of the respondents, in terms of attitude agreed on the accounting course is interesting, fun, relevant, stimulating and hard. In addition, the understanding can be improved by coping with the concepts, getting the correct response and getting good grades in assessment. In terms of perception of difficulties faced in learning the accounting course, more than 40% of the respondents agreed on the challenges: 1) several formulas and calculations to remember; complex concepts; challenges in applying concepts, calculations, and formulas; prone to making mistakes and lack of related previous studies. In relation to the perception of subjective norms influencing accounting principles. more than 40% of non-accounting students agreed that classmates and lecturers influence their interest in the accounting course. For improvement in learning accounting course, more than 60% of the non-major students agreed on: 1) The use of detailed working solutions to tutorial activities; 2) Additional learning support material; 3) Working with classmates during independent study time, and 4) Doing corrections to revision questions. Future research opportunities and implications are provided in this paper.