Abstract 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.
Deakin et al. (Mon,) studied this question.