The Effect of Students’ Perceptions and Learning Approaches on the Quality of Hospitality Financial Management Education

Students’ perceptions and approaches to learning have been shown to be critical factors in determining the quality of the learning outcome. This is the 1st empirical study undertaken in the hospitality context to examine how students’ perceptions and approaches to learning influence the learning outcomes of their financial management courses. The results showed that hospitality students had negative perceptions of the financial management course. With negative perceptions, students are less likely to adopt a deep approach to learning. Because the deep approach can significantly improve students’ performance, whereas the surface approach has the opposite effect, negative perceptions decrease performance through declined adoption of the deep approach. The findings suggest that hospitality educators may enhance the quality of financial management education by changing students’ negative perceptions and by encouraging their utilization of the deep approach.