Developing student competencies: An integrated approach to a financial statement analysis project

•Instructional resource for an integrated financial statement analysis project.•Project designed to develop students' critical thinking and professional competencies.•Requires quantitative analysis of financial statements and written research report.•Includes supporting activities designed to help students achieve learning goals.•Consistent with AICPA Core Competency and Integrated Competency-Based frameworks.

This paper presents an instructional resource for an integrated financial statement analysis project. The project requires a quantitative analysis of a company's financial statements and a written research report. The project is designed to develop students' critical thinking and analytical capabilities through the application of course concepts to a real company, while also providing opportunities to develop professional competencies. Following Anson's Instructional Design Model (2007), the integrated project includes supporting activities, which are designed to aid students in achieving the project's learning goals. The supporting activities include in-class instruction on financial ratios, a computer lab session on Excel, draft papers, peer reviews of writing, and paper revisions. The integrated project also serves as an example of an assignment that is consistent with two recent education frameworks, the Integrated Competency-Based Framework (Lawson et al., 2014) and the AICPA Core Competency Framework (2015), which both advocate for increased integration of professional competencies within the accounting curriculum. Our instructional resource provides project instructions, supporting activities, as well as implementation guidance and a grading rubric. The paper discusses adaptations to tailor the project to various courses and audiences. The resources in this article are useful for instructors implementing a financial statement analysis project into accounting, finance, financial statement analysis and investment courses targeted at either the undergraduate or graduate levels.