Form Over Substance: Learning Objectives In The Business Core

Abstract

While members of the business faculty community have been advocating active learning in the classroom, it appears that textbooks encourage learning from a passive perspective.  A review of learning objectives from 16 textbooks used in Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Finance, and Marketing demonstrates a focus on basically the same set of primary verbs at a low cognitive level. These low cognitive level verbs differ in substance from the expectations contained in the end-of-the-chapter materials.  In a world of assessment, the authors are concerned that the textbook learning objectives seem to focus on the form of technical content and not the substance of student learning.