The Efficacy of Using Monopoly to Improve Undergraduate Students’ Understanding of the Accounting Cycle

We investigate how different methods of instructor-led reviews for an introductory accounting exam may affect student achievement. We compare two review groups: students who review for the exam by playing Monopoly versus those engaged a more traditional review. We also include a third group (no formal review). We conducted an experiment by examining students’ test scores on an accounting cycle exam. The students were placed into three groups: those who played Monopoly to review for the exam, those who participated in a more traditional exam review, and those who did not participate in any formal review. Our results indicate that, as expected, reviewing for an exam significantly improves students’ exam scores when compared to peers that did not review. However, this result is driven by the students in the Monopoly condition. Students in the traditional review did not score statistically significantly higher than those in the control (no review) group. Also, we did not find that students playing Monopoly as a review scored significantly higher than students actively working in a more traditional review. This study contributes to the literature by informing professors about the efficacy of using Monopoly to review the accounting cycle. This is the first paper to directly test the effects of using Monopoly on student achievement.