Formative evaluation for accounting courseware enhancement

This paper presents a formative evaluation of accounting courseware which was developed for non-accounting students at UiTM Terengganu, Dungun campus. The main reasons for the formative evaluation of accounting courseware were to evaluate the courseware´s interface and usability in order to improve the courseware that can be used as a supplementary teaching and learning tool. The study had involved 30 non-accounting students from various programs. The testing group was a combination of students who were taking Financial Accounting 1 during December 2008 - April 2009 semester and those who had already taken the subject during previous semesters. The type of the formative evaluation used was the small group evaluation and paper based questionnaire has been used as the instrument to evaluate different aspects of the courseware. The questionnaire was divided into 5 parts in which Part A was about demographic characteristic, Part B was related to content of courseware, Part C was related to interactivity of the courseware, Part D was related to screen design of the courseware and Part E was to seek students´ opinions toward using the courseware. Based on the result of the formative evaluation, it could be concluded that the accounting courseware was suitable to be used as a supplementary learning material as most of the students were satisfied and pleased with the overall courseware presentation in terms of its contents, user friendly navigation and interesting graphics and animations.