Beginning in the late 1980’s, Accountancy at ILLINOIS developed the first major change in accountancy education since the 1950’s. Known as Project Discovery, the new curriculum includes:

• A conceptual framework based on knowledge of organizations’ value creation processes from the perspectives of strategic management, economics of organization, and systems theory, and the role of information in such value creation processes and in the broader economic markets that provide resources required for value creation.
  
  
• Development of professional skills and attitudes including:
  • Communicating with others in written and oral forms, including the skill of listening;
  • Social skills of organizing, managing, leading, negotiating and persuading;
  • Discovery skills (problem identification, information search and evidence evaluation) that enable research of issues and problems both in archival (database) and behavioral (interview) contexts;
  • Identifying ethical issues and using ethical reasoning to make value-based judgments;
  • Attitudes and personal characteristics such as integrity, skepticism, creativity, and respect for self, others and ideas.
    
    
• Embracement of a constructivist view of learning that emphasizes the use of cooperative and collaborative learning methods:
  • Knowledge is a state of understanding in the mind of the individual knower and must be constructed by each individual through iterative processes of experimentation/ application and reflection;
  • Students participate in their learning by actively applying and reflecting in order to generate meaning (thus learning) for themselves;
  • Students learn that they, rather than others, are the agents responsible for their own learning, but that others are invaluable facilitators for learning.