Lessons for the classroom from Luca Pacioli

Abstract

In 2006, the Teaching and Curriculum Section of the American Accounting Association published a monograph, Reflections on Accounting Education Research. It includes a chapter that demonstrates how research into accounting history can be used in the classroom to inform "students about the changing environment and behavior that influences accounting action." This paper seeks to broaden the applicability of accounting history to accounting education by demonstrating that there are lessons to be learned in both textbook writing and in classroom instruction from the earliest known accounting textbook, the bookkeeping treatise contained within Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita.