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

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