Expertise acquisition in auditing: Training novice auditors to recognize cue relationships in real estate valuation

This study examines the acquisition of expertise in auditing. The research question addressed is: "Can features of experts' problem solving processes be identified and taught to novices to help them learn to perform a task better?" The task studied is the audit of real estate valuations. This task was selected because it represents an ill-structured problem for which experts would be expected to have a comparative advantage. Theoretical predictions were developed based on research in psychology and accounting. In addition, findings from a previous field study (Earley, 1998) guided the hypothesis development.; Two experiments were designed. The purpose of the first experiment was to demonstrate that experts exhibit superior performance with respect to the real estate valuation task, and that this superior performance is due to the recognition of underlying patterns of information. The second experiment was designed to show that novices who are made aware of such patterns will perform better than novices not made aware of the patterns. In addition, the second experiment examined a phenomenon known as the "self-explanation" effect. That is, auditors who are first required to explain the pattern by themselves (before being informed of the pattern) were predicted to perform better than those who did not self-explain.; The results of the first experiment indicate that experts outperformed services when determining the reasonableness of discount rates used in property valuations. Predictions regarding the experts' use of underlying patterns of individuating information were partially supported. It was also predicted that novices would perform worse than experts because of their tendency to focus on information other than individuating patterns; this prediction was also partially supported.; The results of the second experiment indicate that making novices aware of the experts' patterns has a positive effect on the novices' performance on subsequent problems. While the act of self-explaining did not have an incremental impact on performance, further analysis indicates that the quality of the auditor's self-explanation was linked to performance.