Scripts for Accountants: How Experts Organise What They Know

After working memory in Issue 02, picture long-term memory at work. You spot the missing accrual in a student's income statement within seconds, from the first clue or two, while the student is still adding up column two. How do you see it so fast?

Part of the answer is a script. A script is an organised bundle of knowledge about a familiar sequence of events, stored in long-term memory. The classic example is the restaurant script, which lets you predict what happens once you walk in.

The obvious explanation is that experts simply have more scripts. Eugène Custers, a researcher in Utrecht, writes that this is only part of the story, because the structure of each script also changes with expertise.

So how do scripts sharpen? Custers' answer, set out below, is that scripts develop best from seeing many varied cases, not from long discussions of one complex case. In our translation, that complex case is the integrated case.

Try this first: once the basics are in place, scripts seem to sharpen with many varied cases. So before your next integrated case, spend time on short, separate scenarios. That's our suggestion, untested in accounting.

What they found

Custers' review focuses on illness scripts, which have three parts. Enabling Conditions are patient and context factors that affect how likely someone is to get a disease, such as age or occupation.

The Fault is the underlying disease process, and the Consequences are the complaints and signs it produces.

Experience shifts the balance between the parts. In an earlier interview study by Custers and colleagues, students who hadn't started clinical training mentioned more Fault knowledge. Residents and experienced physicians mentioned more Enabling Conditions, which is background about the patient.

Novices lean on the underlying mechanism and reason their way through a case. With experience, those reasoning steps become compiled, which means they no longer need working through one by one. So in routine cases, the Fault plays only a minor role for experts.

That doesn't make the underlying knowledge optional, though. Experts also explain, interpret and judge, so Custers argues that scripts without that knowledge would not be enough for true expertise.

Back to how scripts sharpen, then. For teaching, Custers suggests that once students reach clinical placements, scripts develop best through seeing many patients with different diseases.

In his view, long discussions of complex or "interesting" cases may still be useful, but they won't contribute much to building scripts.

What they did

Custers wrote this narrative review. A narrative review summarises research the author has chosen, rather than systematically searching for every relevant study.

So how much weight can illness scripts carry in an accounting classroom?

The reality check: this is one author's review, and it reports no new data. Much of the support comes from medicine and laboratory psychology, and Custers calls the evidence that everyday script effects apply to illness scripts "some evidence".

Nothing here was tested with accounting students, so every accounting application in this article is ours.