Meta programmes for identifying thinking preferences and their impact on accounting students’ educational experience

Meta programmes are a way of indicating unconscious thinking preferences that influence how a person perceives the world, and how that person behaves and communicates with others. Meta programmes provide an easily understood language that can facilitate an understanding on the part of accounting students and faculty, of metacognitive processes, an important pre-requisite to developing the skill of learning to learn. This paper reports the results of an interview-based study which identifies 11 meta programmes important to the specific context of students’ educational experience. Meta programmes are found to affect the ability/inability of certain students to manage the educational process, a result that improves our understanding of why some students are better at coping with the demands of higher education than others. Since meta programmes are considered to operate at an unconscious or metacognitive level, raising awareness of their thinking and learning styles offers students the opportunity to influence, or change, their own cognitive processes involved in learning and therefore to enhance that learning. An increased understanding on the part of accounting faculty of their own and their students’ meta programmes offers potential for improving communication with students and designing more effective teaching and feedback strategies.