Your Two-Page Prepaid Expenses Section Hides Nine Chunks

To you, a prepaid expense adjustment is one quick thought. You debit the expense, credit the asset and move on. To a first-year, though, it can be a dozen thoughts that refuse to sit still.

Issue 01 asked whether your case study and your quiz feedback were working. Gregory Mostyn asks something more basic, which is whether your material is asking students to juggle more than their heads can hold.

That juggling happens in working memory, the short-term mental space that can hold only small amounts of information. The demand a task puts on it is called cognitive load.

Mostyn's headline example is chunking. A chunk, in his terms, is a related group of pieces of information. He argues that the roughly two pages on prepaid expenses in a typical textbook contain at least nine potential chunks.

Try this first: pick one topic, such as accruals, deferred tax or a lease. List every element students must juggle in it, and teach them in that order. That's our suggestion, not Mostyn's.

What they found

The nine chunks start with defining a prepaid expense and end with the entry's effect on the accounting equation. In between, students must tell it apart from five other possibilities. Those are unearned revenue, depreciation, accrued revenue, accrued expense and no adjustment.

He suggests that a manageable chunk is about four elements. So what should an introductory course do differently? His guidance is to target foundation topics rather than everything, and to reconsider total content because "reducing content reduces load".

He recommends more worked examples, which show the solution steps before students try similar problems. Those steps should fade, leaving more of the solution out each time, and be paired with problems before independent problem-solving.

He also says textbooks should avoid split attention, which happens when text is separated from the illustration it explains. In the same way, they should avoid redundancy, which is text that repeats a self-explanatory table.

Finally, he warns of expertise reversal. Detail that helps novices can slow down students who already know the material. So he recommends building in learner control, which lets students choose when to move on.

As for the research base, his journal review found only two articles applying cognitive load theory principles to accounting instructional design.

What they did

Mostyn, of Mission College, wrote a 2012 paper in Issues in Accounting Education to introduce cognitive load theory (CLT) to accounting instructors, especially in introductory courses. He summarises the theory and its history, and then translates its best-known effects into accounting examples.

He also reviews five accounting-education journals from 2000 to 2010 for papers applying CLT. It is a conceptual paper, which means he argues from existing research and ran no experiment.

Before you act on it, be clear about what kind of evidence sits behind it.

The reality check: this is one author's argument and review, which means the accounting examples are illustrations, not tested interventions. Mostyn himself notes that there are no generally accepted direct measures of cognitive load.

He adds that more work is needed on longer-term transfer, which is the ability to apply learning to new problems. The paper doesn't cover deferred tax, leases or lecture slides specifically. Those applications are ours.