Appcompat checkbox background highlighted instead of the tick

I'm changing from ActionBarSherlock to AppCompat. Previously when a checkbox was checked, the background stayed the same and the tick appeared in the box in the highlight colour. With AppCompat, the background is highlighted, and the tick is outlined in the original background colour.

Is there any way to duplicate the previous behaviour, which in my view looks much better?

(Asking here is a last resort - I have searched extensively for a solution.)

(I am deriving my Preference activity from AppCompatPreferenceActivity, the code for which I found after searching, and implemented it as a class extending PreferenceActivity in my application)