Cognitive Complexity and Accounting Education

Abstract

This chapter elaborates the cognitive complexity and accounting education. Cognitive complexity, also known as conceptual level, can be thought of as the degree to which an individual is equipped to deal with ambiguity in processing information. It is found that to establish the relationship between Paragraph Completion Test (PCT) score, and accounting-related cognitively complex behavior, student performance was assessed in a first-year accounting course on two problems during winter 1990, and the problems selected appear in the appendix to this paper. The subjects of the experiment were students enrolled in sections of an introductory financial accounting course at California State Polytechnic University Pomona. In addition to interitem reliability, the correlation between scores on the problems, and level of cognitive complexity as determined by the PCT was important to the study, and that is, some indication that the supplementary problems, and the PCT were measuring the same psychological construct was needed.