Abstract:
While there is increasing emphasis on the idea that vocational
education should equip students to think well, very little attention is paid in
course design to messages from cognitive research that the quality of
people's subject knowledge Influences their thinking about problems. The
overall aim of the study was to evaluate the usefulness of ideas from
cognitive research and from the 'meta-cognitive movement' In designing
instruction intended to improve students' ability to deal with simple
accounting problems. Anew 'cognitive' approach to teaching an existing
basic accounting module was implemented by further education lecturers
and evaluated using an experimental/control design. The results indicate
that the 'cognitive' instruction significantly improved students' scores on
non-routine accounting tasks. The authors interpret the results as
consistent with their view that the emphasis on understanding and thinking
in this study may be more vocationaliy reievant than Is commonly
supposed.
