Elementos de la Justicia

A request for permission to engage accounting teachers in the data collection was sent to the Brong Ahafo, Northern and Western Regional headquarters of the Ghana Education Service (GES). With the permission letter obtained from GES, the researcher visited the district offices of GES and Heads of senior high schools whose Accounting teachers were selected to participate in the investigation. The visit was to inform the school authorities about the permission granted by the G.E.S for the researcher to engage the teachers in data collection. Two main kinds of data gathered in the study were primary and secondary.

4.7.1 Primary Data Collection

This involved the use of the questionnaires, and the ICC to gather the required data. The questionnaire was administered personally to the participants. This enabled the researcher to assist respondents to understand exactly what the items meant and also to clarify possible issues respondents might find difficult to comprehend. This was done to obtain the right responses. The participants were given a week to complete the questionnaire. Respondents whose questionnaires may not be ready at that time will be given extra time to fill them. The researcher used phone calls as follow up.

Two research assistants and five student-teachers were recruited to guide the administration of the instruments. These assistants were used because they were either natives or residents of those respective regions they were assigned and for that matter each of them was familiar with the terrain. The student teachers, especially, were engaged because they had already been stationed in some of the schools where the responding accounting teachers were

93

teaching. All the student-teachers engaged were those whose major teaching subject was accounting. The advantages this offered included the fact that the mentors of such student- teachers also were respondents and so therefore the ease with which the data collection could be done. In addition, since the instrument was in their subject area it was expected that they would be in the position to interpret the instruments well once asked by respondents for clarification. The researcher played the role of the coordinator visiting each region twice in the course of the data collection to facilitate the progress.

They were trained for two days. The two teaching assistants were sent to Western Region to survey the respondents selected from that portion of the sample by just distributing the instrument. In addition, one student-teacher was made to collect the completed surveys and despatched them to the researcher. Three of the student-teachers were stationed in Brong Ahafo for the purpose of not over-burdening them because the region was very big and the respondents were sparsely populated in the land area of the region. Only one student-teacher was involved in the Northern Region. The reason for this was that the schools in that part of the country were mostly clustered around Tamale, the capital city. Therefore, that single student-teacher was stationed at Tamale to reach out to almost all the respondents in the area. The collection exercise took a period, in total, of approximately one month. The completed instruments were collected and despatched to the researcher through Expedited Mail Service (EMS) and Federal Express (Fedex) delivery systems. The count of the questionnaires received showed an overall return rate of 79.5%. The details are supplied in Table 4.3. However, all the vignette given to the students were retrieved.

Table 4.3: Return Rate of Questionnaire

Zone Region Instruments dispatched Return rate

Middle Brong Ahafo 80 62

Northern Northern 60 53

Southern Western 60 44

Total 200 159

94 4.7.2 Secondary Data Source

The Chief examiner of West African Examinations Council‘s report was examined to explain why the examiners of accounting had concerns about the level of students‘ performance in accounting. Problems they pointed out in the report were used as the proxy of their concerns. These were analysed into the pattern of problems accounting teachers and students have in the instructional discourse. This was translated into the extent of quality marking and the level of implementation of the new accounting curriculum. The reports from 2000 to 2010 for both cost and financial accounting were collected by the researcher for consideration. The use of such secondary data generated by the experts who evaluate the performance of the students taught by accounting teachers is critical in determining the overall quality in the implementation of the curriculum.

The contents of the Chief Examiners‘ Reports were thoroughly explored and critically examined. Much attention was concentrated on the problems that were noted and how that translated into students‘ and teachers‘ conduct in the classroom. The problems were noted and grouped after reports were read from cover to cover. Commonalities in the problems identified permitted the generations of patterns for easier assessment. Since the interest was in capturing as many possible operational patterns of accounting curriculum implementation as possible, the content of the reports were categorized and synthesized to perform content analysis which included data reduction and sense making of the material. This was done by looking for emergent themes and quality of implementation.