Análise das condições de oferta da disciplina contabilidade introdutória: pesquisa junto às universidades estaduais do Paraná

Abstract

Teaching in Accounting has gone through changes, caused by the new official education guidelines and labor market demands. The combination of these and other factors leads to the need to evaluate the supply conditions of Accountancy courses. For this purpose, one option is to study specific subjects, in view of their importance throughout the course. This article shows the result of a research carried out during the second semester of 2003, considering Accountancy courses offered by state universities in Paraná / Brazil, to evaluate the conditions to offer the subject Introductory Accounting. Our exploratory and descriptive research involved course coordinators and introductory accounting faculty. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and questionnaires, indirect documentary research of Brazilian legislation on higher education in Accounting, bibliographic review and data collected from the Graduate Programs in Controllership and Accounting recommended by CAPES (Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel). The results indicate favorable aspects, such as the professors' academic titles, efforts to renew faculty and the coordinators' concern to designate the best professors for teaching the subject. They also revealed a preference for some Introductory Accounting books, the need to review the indication of books applicable to other subjects offered during the course, discrepancies between the information contained in the teaching plans and the faculty's practices in the classroom, concentration on the use of some teaching resources and the faculty and coordinators' suggestions to improve the quality of teaching and learning in Introductory Accounting.