How to design worked examples for transfer, not just imitation

A student may be able to reproduce the journal entry shown five minutes earlier. The more revealing moment comes when the facts change. Cash has moved at a different time, the opening account balance is different, or the transaction requires another form of adjustment. Can students identify what still applies, and what must change?

This is a problem of transfer: using knowledge in a meaningfully different task rather than repeating a demonstrated procedure with new numbers.

A 2026 integrative review by Louis Bourgaux, André Tricot and Fred Paas examines how worked examples might support this kind of learning. The authors screened 2,644 records and included 85 empirical reports representing 127 studies or experiments. The evidence spans several disciplines and educational settings. No accounting-specific study was identified in the supplied text. Later sections of the article and the supplementary study catalogue were not available for independent checking, so the full distribution of studies by domain could not be verified.

The review brings together varied findings through a structured narrative synthesis rather than calculating a pooled average effect. Its conclusions are correspondingly conditional. Conceptual explanations, self-explanation prompts, deliberate errors, comparison between examples and gradual withdrawal of guidance may help under some conditions. Their value can depend on prior knowledge, task complexity, timing and the support given to learners.

For accounting educators, these are design ideas worth testing, not a validated recipe for producing transfer.

A correct answer is only part of the example

Worked examples are valuable because they reduce unproductive searching. A novice facing an unfamiliar accounting problem must interpret the facts, recall relevant concepts, select accounts, perform calculations and construct an entry. Providing a model solution reduces some of those demands and directs attention towards a viable approach.

This benefit is often explained through cognitive load. Working memory has limited capacity, so too many unfamiliar elements can overwhelm a learner. A complete example offers temporary guidance while the student develops an organised understanding of the problem.

Yet the visible procedure can dominate attention. Students may remember to debit one account and credit another without understanding why those accounts fit the economic event. Success on a nearly identical practice question can then look more impressive than it is.

The review distinguishes factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive knowledge. In an accounting example, these translate into four useful questions:

• Does the student understand the terminology and relevant rules?
• Can the student explain the accounting relationship represented by the entry?
• Can the student calculate the amount and execute the procedure?
• Can the student check the result and recognise when the familiar procedure does not fit?

A model answer need not become a lengthy textbook explanation. The practical question is whether it makes the important decisions visible, rather than displaying only the finished mechanics.

Redesign one adjusting-entry example

Consider a simple classroom exercise. Employees have provided services worth $4,800 by the reporting date, but the amount will be paid in the following period. For this exercise, the required treatment is to recognise a current-period wages expense and a corresponding payable.

The worked answer is:

Debit wages expense $4,800. Credit wages payable $4,800.

The educational review is not an accounting authority. This and the later insurance illustration use explicit classroom assumptions and should be aligned with the technical requirements and terminology of the relevant course.

The entry is concise and balanced, but it does not show how the treatment was selected. A redesigned example could make the reasoning visible in five short steps:

1. Identify the event: employees have already provided services.
2. Locate it in time: the services were received in the current reporting period.
3. Separate payment from recognition: cash has not yet been paid, but the exercise requires the expense to be recognised now.
4. Select the accounts: recognise wages expense and wages payable.
5. Check the effects: profit before tax decreases and liabilities increase by $4,800. Ignoring any associated tax effects, equity also decreases by $4,800.

The extra explanation should be selective. Information that helps a novice can become redundant for a more knowledgeable student. Poorly integrated commentary can also increase mental effort without improving understanding. The aim is not to annotate every debit and credit, but to expose the decisions students will need to make again.

Ask students to explain a decision

One way to deepen the example is to ask students to generate part of the reasoning themselves, a technique researchers call self-explanation. Useful prompts might include:

• Which fact shows that the expense relates to the current period?
• Why is cash not credited in this entry?
• What evidence supports recognition of an amount payable?
• What would be misstated if the adjustment were omitted?

These questions direct attention to timing, evidence and financial statement effects. They demand more than a restatement of the entry.

Evidence for self-explanation is promising, including on transfer tasks, but the quality of the prompt and the learner’s prior knowledge matter. A novice may produce a shallow or incorrect explanation when asked only, “Why?” A more supportive version could provide two possible explanations, ask the student to select one and require a brief justification. Feedback remains important.

Use an error as a diagnostic task

The lecturer could then show a deliberately flawed entry:

Debit wages expense $4,800. Credit cash $4,800.

Students are told that the entry contains an error. Their task is to identify it, explain why it conflicts with the transaction facts and correct it.

The valuable part is not merely circling “cash”. Students should connect the correction to the evidence: payment has not occurred, while the exercise requires recognition of an outstanding obligation.

Erroneous examples can encourage diagnostic reasoning, particularly when the error is signalled and followed by a correct solution and feedback. Simply exposing novices to incorrect work is riskier. Students with weak prior knowledge may not detect the problem, or may remember the incorrect procedure. A supported comparison between the flawed and correct entries is therefore more defensible than an unexplained trap.

Remove support in response to learning

The next step is fading, which means gradually withdrawing parts of the worked solution. Instead of moving directly from a complete model to an unaided question, the lecturer might use this sequence:

• a full solution showing the event, reasoning, entry and financial statement effects;
• a partially completed example in which students select the accounts;
• an example containing only prompts about timing, recognition and payment;
• an unworked problem requiring a complete solution and justification.

Findings on fading and transfer are mixed. Pace matters. Novices may need guidance for longer, while students who already understand the topic can find repeated explanations unnecessary. A short check after the partially completed example can help determine whether to remove more support or retain it.

This makes fading a response to student performance rather than a fixed timetable.

Change the structure, not just the numbers

If the final question changes $4,800 to $6,200 but leaves everything else intact, it mainly tests whether students can repeat the demonstrated procedure. A more demanding task changes how the transaction works while preserving a relevant underlying idea.

Suppose an entity pays $12,000 for a 12-month insurance policy. Coverage begins on the payment date, exactly four full months before the reporting date, and is consumed evenly over the policy term. The original payment was recorded as:

Debit prepaid insurance $12,000. Credit cash $12,000.

At the reporting date, four months of coverage have elapsed. The insurance expense is therefore:

$12,000 × 4/12 = $4,000

The remaining prepaid insurance is:

$12,000 × 8/12 = $8,000

The adjusting entry is:

Debit insurance expense $4,000. Credit prepaid insurance $4,000.

This problem cannot be solved by copying the accrued-wages entry. Cash was paid in advance, and the adjustment reduces an existing asset rather than recognising an unpaid liability. Students must nevertheless use related reasoning about the reporting period, the economic event and the relationship between an expense and a balance sheet account.

A useful comparison activity would ask:

• What principle or reporting idea is shared by the two examples?
• How does the timing of cash differ?
• Why does one adjustment create a liability while the other reduces an asset?
• What would be misstated if the insurance adjustment were omitted?

Ignoring tax effects, omitting the insurance adjustment would understate expense and overstate prepaid insurance, profit and equity by $4,000.

This comparison can provide more information than asking only for the final entry. It can offer clues about how students align the underlying reasoning across transactions with different surface features. It should not automatically be labelled far transfer, however. Transfer distance can involve changes in structure, context, time and required judgement, and there is no single threshold separating near from far transfer.

A practical question is whether students must adapt an idea or can retrieve a rehearsed template.

Start with one example and one comparison

There is no need to rebuild a course around every feature discussed in the review. A manageable trial could begin with one existing worked example:

1. Add brief reasoning at the main decision points.
2. Insert one or two focused explanation prompts.
3. Include one supported error-analysis task.
4. Provide a partially completed example before independent work.
5. Assess both a familiar problem and one with a changed structure.

Look beyond the percentage of correct entries. Students’ explanations, account choices and errors can provide clues about how they are reasoning and why they think the method applies. If performance improves only on questions that resemble the model, the redesigned sequence may have supported procedural practice without producing the intended adaptability.

A single classroom comparison cannot establish a causal effect, but it can provide tentative local evidence about how students respond when the accounting structure changes.

Complete worked solutions remain valuable, especially during early learning. The design challenge is not to discard them. It is to make the important structure visible, invite students to reason about it, and remove enough support before asking them to face a genuinely different problem.