A framework for integrating "R" programming into the accounting curriculum

In recent years professional accountancy bodies (e.g., CPA), accreditation institutions (e.g., AACSB) and employers have steadily raised, and continue to raise expectations regarding the need for accounting graduates to demonstrate skills in data analytics. One of the obstacles accounting instructors face in seeking to implement data analytics, however, is that they need access to ample teaching materials. Unfortunately, there are few such resources available for advanced programming languages such as R. While skills in commonly used applications such as Excel are no doubt needed, employers often take these for granted and incremental value is only added if graduates can demonstrate knowledge in using more advanced data analytics tools for decision-making such as coding in programming languages. This, together with the current dearth of resources available to accounting instructors to teach advanced programming languages is what drives motivation for this chapter. Specifically, we develop an intuitive, two-dimensional framework for incorporating R (a widely used open-source analytics tool with a powerful embedded programming language) into the accounting curriculum. Our model uses complexity as an integrating theme. We incorporate complexity into this framework at the dataset level (simple and complex datasets) and at the analytics task level (simple and complex tasks). We demonstrate two-dimensional framework by drawing on authentic simple and complex datasets as well as simple and complex tasks that could readily be incorporated into the accounting curriculum and ultimately add value to businesses. R script programming code are provided for all our illustrations.