Abstract Consistent with the recommendations of the Accounting Education Change Commission (1990, 1992), one emphasis of the new paradigm proposed by Jones and Duncan (1995) is the need to teach tax "skills" vs. tax "facts." Human information-processing theories of cognition, in particular ACT-R, provide a framework to understand the acquisition and transfer of knowledge. These theories posit that knowledge is comprised of two elements: declarative knowledge (facts) and procedural knowledge (skills). Accordingly, if students are going to acquire tax skills vs. tax facts, they will need to acquire procedural knowledge. This paper discusses the characteristics of procedural knowledge and proposes a method of teaching the introductory tax course to promote the acquisition of procedural knowledge. Briefly stated, the proposed method suggests that (1) instruction should be organized around specific tax skills, (2) a task analysis should be completed for each skill, (3) instruction should be example based, arid (4) students should be given practice on holistic real-world problems. This paper identifies a missing link between the acquisition of declarative knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to a task in a specific situation. Our experience indicates that the method leads to the acquisition of identifiable tax skills.
Gore et al. (Tue,) studied this question.