When should accounting lecturers take the scaffolding away?

An accounting student opens a consolidation worksheet and sees prompts for every stage: identify the relevant balances, enter each consolidation or elimination adjustment in the worksheet, complete the required columns and perform the specified reconciliation checks. For a novice, that structure may make an unfamiliar process manageable.

Several weeks later, the same student receives the same template. This time, the prompts may simply encourage mechanical completion. The student follows the sequence without deciding what information matters or how to organise the task independently.

Should the lecturer preserve support because the accounting remains complex, or remove it because the student has progressed?

A 2014 guide in Medical Teacher approaches this problem through cognitive load theory. Its central premise is that working memory, the mental space in which we actively process information, has limited capacity. Learning may be impeded when a learner must coordinate more unfamiliar information than that capacity can comfortably handle.

The guide is not an accounting education study. It is a narrative theory and practice paper that uses selected research and medical examples, without a systematic search or formal appraisal of the evidence. Its cited studies were not independently checked for this article, and no later cognitive load research or accounting education literature was reviewed. The accounting applications that follow are editorial translations for local testing; this medical education guide does not show that they improve accounting learning.

Within those boundaries, the guide offers a valuable question for course design: does this learner need more guidance, less guidance or a different kind of guidance for this particular task?

The same task is not equally difficult for every student

Complexity is often treated as a property of the task. A multi-adjustment consolidation problem may be complex for a novice, while a routine journal entry based on familiar facts may be relatively simple. Cognitive load theory adds an important qualification: the demands of a task also depend on what the learner already knows.

A novice may need to think separately about the purpose of the worksheet, the meaning of each column, the relationship between the entities, the adjustments required and the effect of each adjustment on the final figures. These elements interact, so a misunderstanding in one place can affect the rest of the task.

A more experienced student may organise several of those elements into a familiar structure. The task has not changed, but the student can draw on established accounting knowledge rather than processing every detail as new information.

This helps explain why a prompt that supports one student can distract another. The guide calls this the expertise-reversal effect. Worked examples, templates and detailed instructions may reduce unproductive searching for novices. As relevant knowledge develops, the same support can become redundant or potentially interfere with the learner’s own approach.

“Novice” and “experienced” should not be treated as fixed labels. A student may work independently on routine transactions but require substantial support with deferred tax or an unfamiliar audit judgement. Expertise is specific to the knowledge required by the task.

The practical implication is that guidance should not be withdrawn merely because the class has reached week eight. Progress through the calendar is not evidence that students have developed the relevant knowledge. Their work is more informative: can they select a method, explain their reasoning, identify consequential information and recover from an error without relying on the template?

Remove difficulty that does not serve the learning goal

The guide distinguishes the demands essential to performing a task from demands created by the way instruction is designed. It calls the first intrinsic load and the second extraneous load. It also discusses germane load, meaning effort directed towards learning and organising knowledge, although the authors acknowledge debate about whether this is genuinely a separate category.

For accounting educators, the most immediately useful distinction is between necessary complexity and avoidable difficulty.

Suppose students are learning to complete a consolidation worksheet. The relationships among balances, adjustments and reported amounts are part of the accounting challenge. They should not be removed simply to make the activity feel easier. By contrast, students might also have to switch repeatedly between an unexplained worksheet, instructions on another page and a worked calculation stored elsewhere. That search may consume attention without advancing the intended learning.

A lecturer could review the activity by asking:

• Is notation introduced before students are expected to use it?
• Are instructions and the corresponding part of the worksheet unnecessarily separated?
• Does the example contain detail that is irrelevant to the learning objective?
• Are spoken explanations aligned with what students can see?
• Does a student need prerequisite knowledge that has not been activated or checked?

The answer is not always to bring every piece of information together. Locating and evaluating information may itself be an intended capability, particularly in an audit case or research task. If students are meant to learn how to search a file, navigate source documents or decide which evidence is relevant, that activity is part of the challenge rather than a presentation defect.

The learning goal therefore matters. Searching for a hidden instruction while learning worksheet mechanics is different from searching an audit file when evidence selection is being assessed.

Nor should reducing cognitive load become a general aim to make learning effortless. Comparing cases, explaining reasoning and dealing with variation can be mentally demanding precisely because they require students to make useful connections. The design question is whether the effort is directed towards the accounting or towards overcoming an avoidable obstacle in the materials.

Move from demonstration to independence

The guide describes a progression from worked examples to partially completed problems and then to independent problem solving. This offers a practical way to vary support without moving abruptly from a full demonstration to an unstructured task.

For a complex worksheet activity, the sequence might look like this:

1. Study a complete example. Students receive the case information and a technically checked solution in which each stage is explained. They are asked to connect the entries and adjustments to the completed worksheet rather than merely copy the format.
2. Complete selected stages. The structure remains visible, but students must supply some adjustments, explanations or worksheet amounts. The missing elements should require them to use the reasoning demonstrated previously.
3. Choose the next steps. Students receive less procedural prompting and must decide how to organise the task. A short checklist may remain available for those who need it.
4. Complete an independent case. Students receive the necessary case information without the original template. They must produce and explain an appropriate solution.

This is an accounting adaptation of the guide’s broader principles, not a sequence tested by the source. The appropriate number of stages and the point at which support should be removed will vary with the task and the students.

Self-explanation can make the early stages more active. Instead of asking students only to read a completed solution, a lecturer might pause at a consequential step and ask: “Why is this adjustment needed here?” or “Which amounts or relationships would be misstated if this adjustment were omitted, and could the worksheet still balance?” Self-explanation simply means asking learners to explain part of the reasoning to themselves or someone else.

The guide also cautions against stripping a complex professional activity into disconnected fragments. Focused practice can be helpful for routine components, but students eventually need to coordinate those components within a meaningful whole task. Practising individual worksheet adjustments has a different purpose from completing and interpreting the full worksheet. A course may need both.

Let performance, not preference, guide the next change

Students’ reactions can identify confusing instructions or inaccessible materials, but a task feeling difficult does not necessarily mean it is badly designed. It may be appropriately demanding. Equally, a task feeling easy may indicate fluent understanding, or it may mean that the template is doing too much of the thinking.

A small formative pilot can provide better evidence. A lecturer might redesign one activity rather than an entire module, then examine:

• the types and locations of errors;
• whether students can explain their choices;
• how much prompting they request;
• whether they can complete a related task without the original structure;
• completion time, where that measure is relevant;
• students’ reports of which parts were difficult or unclear.

No single indicator measures cognitive load completely. Errors may reflect missing knowledge, misunderstanding, anxiety or inattention. Fast completion may indicate fluency or superficial work. Self-reported difficulty can add useful context, but should not be treated as an objective diagnosis.

The strongest lesson from the guide is therefore not that lecturers should use more worked examples or remove templates sooner. It is that instructional support has a changing value. The same scaffold can open a task to a beginner, become unnecessary for an intermediate learner and obscure independent performance if it remains indefinitely.

A useful review of any complex accounting activity begins with three questions: what accounting knowledge must students coordinate, what difficulty have the materials added, and what evidence would show that a particular support is no longer needed?