Learning about the ethical treatment of human subjects in experiments on a web facility with a conversational agent and ITS components

Abstract

The Human Use Regulatory Affairs Advisor (HURAA) is a webbased help facility that provides training on the ethical use of human subjects in research, and that serves as an information retrieval system on ethical policies. The content for HURAA is derived from United States Federal agency documents and regulations. HURAA has a number of components that go beyond conventional page-turning or hypertext systems, including (1) an animated conversational agent that serves as a navigational guide for the web facility, (2) an enhanced multimedia introduction, (3) lessons with case-based and explanation-based reasoning, and (4) document retrieval through natural language queries or a Point & Query facility. The effectiveness of HURAA was tested on a small sample of participants (N = 18) who were assigned to either the full HURAA version or a conventional computer-based training version.