Assessing students' confidence in interpreting dental radiographs following a blended learning module

Effectiveness of blended pedagogy for radiographic interpretation skills in operative dentistry - a comparison of test scores and student experiences at an undergraduate dental school in Pakistan

BACKGROUND

Utilizing Blended pedagogy (BP) in radiographic skills may prove to be an effective teaching strategy. However, studies on the use of BP in dentistry are quite limited in Pakistan, where teaching has mostly been via traditional Didactic Lectures (DL); and radiographic interpretation skills of undergraduate dental students are suboptimal. Therefore, this study aims to assess whether utilizing BP to teach radiographic interpretation skills is an effective teaching methodology in Pakistan.

METHODS

This mixed-method study was conducted on final year dental students at Jinnah Medical and Dental College (JMDC). Two groups of students were utilized for this study, one taught by traditional DL and the other taught by BP for the same module. BP was conducted over six weeks. A post-module test was conducted in both groups. Additionally, the BP group completed a modified Community of Inquiry (CoI) survey tool and volunteered to discuss their experiences through a focused group discussion (FGD). Descriptive statistics were computed and independent sample t-test was used to analyse the difference between the scores of the two groups. Thematic analysis was performed for the qualitative data.

RESULTS

The mean post-test scores were found to be significantly higher in the BP group (61.0 ± 10.2) compared to the DL group (44.4 ± 12.3) (p = < 0.001, CI = 95%, Cronbach Alpha > 0.8). The mean scores for the modified CoI instrument were 4.0 ± 0.29 for the whole instrument; 4.25 ± 0.22 for Teaching Presence, 3.71 ± 0.23 for Social Presence and 3.97 ± 0.16 Cognitive Presence, with all three having a Cronbach's alpha > 0.75. Thematic analysis revealed that BP students mutually agreed that BP method was beneficial with the appreciation of strong support from the facilitator. However, challenges like interrupted power supply and increased effort requirement from students were pointed out.

CONCLUSION

Students taught radiographic interpretation skills with BP in comparison to DL had higher test scores and expressed a positive experience demonstrated via a modified CoI survey and FGD. Considering the encouraging results found, dental schools should incorporate BP in their teaching methodology and follow-up studies are needed to further support the use of BP as an effective teaching methodology in Dentistry.