ABSTRACT
The concept of problem based learning (PBL) is one in which there has been growing interest over recent years in a wide variety of subjects across the academic spectrum. While it has been contended that PBL broadly emerged from the early 1960s (Barrows and Tamlyn, 1980), slightly earlier Popper (1959) had suggested that learning takes place through the initial formulation of hypotheses and through subsequent experiential testing of those hypotheses. Rogers (1969) has taken the view that person-centred learning is the way forward while Knowles (1975) has argued that teacher-centred subject-based learning assumes that the learner's experience is of less value than the teacher's. Student-centred learning thus focuses on the process of learning to learn and can potentially challenge traditional methods of teaching. Indeed, it might be argued that this challenge is greater where the emphasis is on teaching technical material as with a subject such as accounting
where tradition implies a didactic prescribed approach to problem solving. This change in approach can also be a worry to the teacher who may feel more comfortable with topics that have unique solutions. This is again directly relevant to accounting teaching.
