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IN recent years, there has been a growing demand for significant changes in the design and delivery of accounting education. The calls for change are based on evidence and pressure from a variety of quarters. Professional accountants expressed dissatisfaction with the state of accounting education (Perspectives...1989; Inman et al. 1989; Elliott 1991) about the same time that regulators were exerting pressure to revamp accounting curricula (Treadway Commission Report 1987). Research by accounting academics also found that the accounting curriculum was not adequately serving the profession's needs (American Accounting Association (AAA) 1986) and urged the need to reemphasize teaching in accounting programs (Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) 1990). The call to reconsider the importance of teaching is not limited to accounting, but extends to all fields of higher education (Boyer 1990).
Historically, the standard practice in teaching accounting in universities has been for the professor to dispense information to students who are passive recipients of that information. The delivery of the mechanistic aspects of accounting pronouncements by the professor to the students has typically been the focus in teaching accounting. This model of the teaching-learning process, known as the transmittal approach, treats students' minds as containers to be filled with certain information related to accounting rules, methods and official pronouncements. Recently, however, this model has received much criticism. Critics of the transmittal approach distinguish knowledge from information. They argue that knowledge is not just a set of rules that simply need to be transferred intact from the professor to the student. Rather knowledge is a state of mind that can only exist in the mind of the individual knower; and, as such, knowledge must be constructed--or reconstructed --by each individual knower through the process of trying to make sense of new information in terms of what that individual already knows (King 1992, 158). Under this constructivist model of learning, students use their existing knowledge and experience to understand new material and to generate relationships between it and what they have learned before (Brown and Campione 1986; Thomas and Rohwer 1986; Wittrock 1990).
Among the major criticisms of the traditional accounting curriculum is that it is rule driven and requires students to memorize volumes of accounting standards that govern various types of financial transactions (Keating and Jablonsky...