Project Discovery Research Articles

Educating for Accounting Expertise: A Field Study

This paper compares the effectiveness of Project Discovery (PD) with the traditional accounting undergraduate program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). PD is a comprehensive program of instruction designed to implement an educating for expertise approach to accounting education. More specifically, PD emphasizes acquiring intellectual skills and improving attitudes without losing traditional accounting declarative knowledge. We compare the instructional processes used with, and learning outcomes of, the first class of PD graduates with samples of same-semester traditional program graduates. Our data include measures of course syllabi and students' demographic characteristics, declarative knowledge, intellectual skills, and attitudes. We analyze data on instructional processes using ANCOVAs and x2 anal

Discussion of Educating for Accounting Expertise: A Field Study

Stone and Shelley set out to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational program known as Project Discovery (PD), a joint project of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of Notre Dame. The paper submitted for this Journal issue was significantly revised after the conference. Hence, this discussion combines points raised during the conference with my own observations about the post-conference revisions to the paper. The PD program differs from a traditional accounting program in several ways that are described by Stone and Shelley, by documents provided at an Accounting Education Change Commission-sponsored Project Discovery Conference that took place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 1996, and by documents on the UIUC website [http://www.cba.uiuc.edu/-accy/projdisc/pdintro.htm]. The two most fundamental differences are the change in pedagogy (moving from a lecture-centered approach to an active-learning approach) and the change in emphasis from a traditional focus on declarative knowledge to an emphasis on development of intellectual skills (e.g., analytical, communication, and interpersonal skills) and attitudes (e.g., tolerance for ambiguity, attitudes about programmatic success). These changes also yield a major change in performance evaluation methods. For example, the Project Discovery Conference documents indicate that multiplechoice exam questions have been virtually eliminated, being superseded