Comments on a study by Martin L. Gosman on the investigation of companies which have made changes in their accounting policies. Problems with the study; Insights on the data presented in the study; Suggestions for the improvement of the methodology.

There has been a great deal of interest expressed in the development of accounting curricula for students wishing to pursue a career in management accounting, as of April 1975. At University of Texas in Austin, Texas, it was felt that practitioners in the management accounting field should be consulted to determine their perceptions of the usefulness of various management accounting topics in their work experiences. A group of faculty met to consider what topics should be included in such a survey. A list of thirty-nine topics was chosen from consulting the indexes and table of contents in several managerial and cost accounting texts, as well as from discussion with a small group of management accounting practitioners. An analysis of the results of the survey indicated there were five major rank-order groups of topics, namely, performance evaluation, responsibility accounting, internal control, tax factors in business decisions and profit planning and control. These groups were determined by searching for gaps between topics in the scale-weighted averages.

This article describes a taxonomy of cognitive skills which has been designed by a group of educational psychologists and identifies the implications thereof for the development of accounting courses and the accounting curriculum. The taxonomy is designed to give precise direction to the learning process and is expressed in terms of expected student behavior at each level in the accounting program. The primary focus of this paper is on the financial accounting program. The taxonomy is relevant to the development of curriculum in that it reveals the elements in the learning process, orders them in an educationally logical sequence, and helps explain the interrelationships among them. It raises questions not only of what should be taught, but also of when and why it should be taught.