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DEWEX is a server-based environment for developing Web-based experiments. It provides many features for creating and running complex experimental designs on a local server. It is freeware and allows for both using default features, for which only text input is necessary, and easy configurations that can be set up by the experimenter. The tool also provides log files on the local server that can be interpreted and analyzed very easily. As an illustration of how DEWEX can be used, a recent study is presented that demonstrates the system's most important features. This study investigated learning from multiple hypertext sources and shows the influences of task, source of information, and hypertext presentation format on the construction of mental representations of a hypertext about a historical event.
DEWEX: AN OVERVIEW
The Development Environment for Web-Based Experiments (DEWEX) is an environment for generating and conducting Web-based experiments either on the Internet or in the laboratory. It has been developed since 2001 within the hypertext research project "User-Oriented Presentation of Information on the Internet," together with the Chemnitz LogAnalyzer (Brunstein, Naumann, & Krems, 2005). The Chemnitz LogAnalyzer is a free tool for analyzing log files from Web-based experiments (e.g., those conducted with DEWEX). The "heart" of DEWEX is the CGI program nm.cgi, which interprets the folder and document structure of the environment for conducting Web-based experiments. These experiments can be generated with DEWEX even by those with little expertise in programming or in using the Internet and HTML. With the help of DEWEX, the materials for the experiment (i.e., instructions, questionnaires for participants' data, pretests, text or picture materials for different experimental conditions, posttests, and additional questionnaires) can be created, and the order of the presented materials and the assignment of participants to different experimental conditions can be defined. Experimental designs with one or more factors, whether within subjects, between subjects, or mixed, are possible. Those experiments can then be made available on the Web (e.g., by being linked to on an index.html page) and data can subsequently be collected. Log files are generated by DEWEX and automatically stored on the local Web server in an Experiment folder. Users' data can be collected in the form of answers input via radio buttons, pull-down menus, or interactive text...