Is It News or Nonsense? Accounting Class Activities to Help Students Think Critically and Skeptically About AI-Is It News or Nonsense? Accounting Class Activities to Help Students Think Critically and Skeptically About AI

Is It News or Nonsense? Accounting Class Activities to Help Students Think Critically and Skeptically About AI

Video Transcription

Video Summary

Wendy Tietz and Tracie Miller presented resources for teaching critical thinking, professional skepticism, and ethical judgment in accounting, especially in the age of AI. They explained that students often trust AI outputs too readily, so these activities are designed to help them question results, verify information, and improve prompting skills.  

The presenters shared a free collection of 12-plus activity types for introductory financial accounting, with managerial accounting materials to be released soon. Activities are organized by topic and designed to take only 5–10 minutes, making them easy to add to existing lessons. Examples included “News or Nonsense” headlines and short videos, “Trust but Verify” exercises where students identify AI errors, “Accounting is the Language of Business” tasks focused on bias and tone, ethical dilemma role-play or video scenarios, missing information games, and prompt-improvement activities.  

They also introduced the CLEVR framework: Clarify, Look, Evaluate, Verify, Examine, and Reflect. This framework helps students evaluate AI-generated information more thoughtfully and responsibly. The resources are flexible for in-person, online, discussion-based, or polling formats, and instructors can adapt them as needed.

Keywords

critical thinking

professional skepticism

ethical judgment

accounting education

artificial intelligence

prompting skills

CLEVR framework

AI verification

financial accounting activities