The effects of contextualized access to knowledge on judgement

This research conceptualizes contextualized access to knowledge, i.e. the ability to access task domain knowledge within the context of problem-solving and investigates its effects on knowledge dissemination. Two informationally equivalent versions of a financial analysis knowledge-based system (KBS) were compared in a laboratory experiment, one with contextualized access to the underlying task domain knowledge (deep explanations) via hypertext-style links and the other without such access. Results indicate that contextualized access had significant advantages. It afforded a major portion of the requests for deep explanations to occur in the context of problem-solving, as opposed to in the abstract, and led to a significant increase in the number of requests. The increased utilization of deep explanations and contextualized use were associated with a greater degree of congruence between users' judgement and KBS. The conclusion is that availability of knowledge alone is not sufficient; contextualized accessibility is the key for knowledge dissemination and for influencing performance. (C) 2001 Academic Press.