Abstract
Previous research during the development of Antibody IDentification Assistant (AIDA) revealed that many medical technology students and other laboratory personnel have serious difficulties in determining the specificity of blood group alloantibodies, especially weak or multiple antibodies. Based on these previous results, AIDA was modified to provide a teaching environment for medical technology students. We report the results of a rigorous, objective evaluation of the resultant system, the Transfusion Medicine Tutor (TMT). The results show that the students who were taught by an instructor using TMT to provide the instructional environment went from 0 percent correct on a pretest case to 87 percent correct on posttests (n = 15). This increase compares with an improvement rate of 20 percent by a control group (n = 15) who used a passive version of the system with the tutoring functions turned off.