Knowledge acquisition and memory effects involving an expert system designed as a learning tool for internal control assessment

The assessment of internal control is a consideration in all financial statement audits, as stressed by the Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 78. According to this statement, ‘the auditor should obtain an understanding of internal control sufficient to plan the audit’ (Accounting Standards Board, 1995, p. 1). Therefore, an accounting student will progress through the auditing course with the responsibility of learning how and why internal controls are assessed. Research in expert systems applied to auditing has shown that there is strong support for the constructive dialogue used in expert systems as a means of encouraging their use in decision making. The purpose of this study is to provide the student or novice auditor with a method for developing a more comprehensive understanding of internal controls and the use of internal controls in audit planning. The results of the study reinforce previous findings that novices do better when an expert system applies analogies along with declarative explanations, and clarifies the length of time in which the use of active learning in a training system can provide an improvement to declarative knowledge, but procedural knowledge must be acquired over a longer time frame.