Zusammenfassung

Imagine that you are Dr Stellar Educator and for the last 5 years you have been teaching a course on professionalism to medical students. As part of the course, you have collected data on attitudinal changes of the course participants. The collected data have been impressive, and you would now like to share your data with the academic world by publishing the results in Family Medicine. As you prepare the manuscript, a colleague mentions something about needing approval by your local Institutional Review Board (IRB), and you wonder whether this is really necessary. Is educational research subject to the same standards and expectations as is clinical biomedical research? This paper's purposes are to answer this question and to review the standard requirements for human subjects protection in educational research.