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Summary:

This paper explains the use of reflective learning techniques to create and deliver a new ethics course, during this course; students apply virtue-based reasoning with reflective thinking to resolve conflicts faced by accounting professionals. This approach helps students transform existing ideas and understandings to come to a new understanding of situation, and may enhance ethical understanding and enable students to apply virtue and reflective thinking to a variety of situations. Students have more time to process their ideas and involve in the learning process. Both reflection and virtue are agent-based approach, which concerns the fundamental character and motivations of the individual’s behaviors. The development, implementation, and delivery of reflection learning into accounting ethics course could emphasize virtue-based reasoning for accounting students. The classical Greek philosophy considers virtue as a state or disposition of a person, and decision-making process is determined by the intellectual virtues. In ethics education, intellectual virtue can be conveyed through teaching and encouraging the learners to reflect on what he/she learned and how it may be applied in other instances. In addition, accountants need to recognize the importance of virtue in performing professional responsibilities. For reflective learning, there are two reflection abilities: reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Reflection-in-action is the ability to build new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation, while reflection-on-action is the ability to define characteristic of professional practice. Based on Thorne (2001), virtue ethics emphasizes the need for ethical motivation and intention to carry out...

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...hould include fundamental ethics principles and real fraud cases. However, the role-playing exercises only involve several groups of students, a more involvement exercise instead of role-playing should be introduced in class. An ethical dilemma simulation exercise could be an alternative component for accounting ethics courses, because it can involve all students in a role-playing exercise, and students can adjust their ethical judgment and decisions to see the impacts on the final results. Variety ethical issues in one case simulation also help students improve their moral sensitivity and awareness, and the reflection assignments after the case simulation involve the reflective thinking for accounting students. Therefore, simulation can help instructors to simplify the class materials, and also achieving the objectives and purposes of accounting ethics education.