No abstract

Despite being core to the dental curriculum, overall minimal time is dedicated to the delivery of tooth morphology, creating a reliance on the student to learn the material. New forms of delivery including computer-assisted learning tools should help sustain learning and previously acquired knowledge.

Tooth morphology has a pivotal role in the dental curriculum and provides one of the important foundations of clinical practice. To supplement tooth morphology teaching a three‐dimensional (3D) quiz application (app) was developed. The 3D resource enables students to study tooth morphology actively by selecting teeth from an interactive quiz, modify their viewpoint and level of zoom. Additionally, students are able to rotate the tooth to obtain a 3D spatial understanding of the different surfaces of the tooth. A cross‐over study was designed to allow comparison of students’ results after studying with the new application or traditionally with extracted/model teeth. Data show that the app provides an efficient learning tool and that students’ scores improve with usage (18% increase over three weeks, P < 0.001). Data also show that student assessment scores were correlated with scores obtained while using the app but were not influenced by the teaching modality initially accessed (r2 = 0.175, P < 0.01). Comparison of the 2016 and 2017 class performance shows that the class that had access to the app performed significantly better on their final tooth morphology assessment (68.0% ±15.0 vs. 75.3% ±13.4, P < 0.01). Furthermore, students reported that the 3D application was intuitive, provided useful feedback, presented the key features of the teeth, and assisted in learning tooth morphology. The 3D tooth morphology app thus provides students with a useful adjunct teaching tool for learning dental anatomy. Anat Sci Educ 00: 000–000. © 2018 American Association of Anatomists.

Several teaching resources are used to enhance the learning of anatomy. The purpose of this study was to examine the preference of medical students on the use of various resources to learn anatomy and their link to 12 learning outcomes. A selected response item questionnaire was administered that asked students to rank six laboratory teaching resources from most to least preferred, and rate how useful these six resources were towards achieving 12 learning outcomes. These learning outcomes covered many of the learning domains such as demonstrating an understanding of anatomy, visualizing structures, appreciating clinical correlations, and understanding anatomical variations. Medical students ranked cadaveric prosections paired with an active learning clinical tutorial as the highest rank and most useful resource for learning anatomy, followed by dissection videos, electronic resources, and printed material, followed by plastinated specimens and plastic models. Overall, cadaveric prosections were also rated as the most helpful teaching resource in achieving various learning outcomes. In conclusion, anatomy teachers should provide prosections coupled with clinical tutorials as well as electronic resources as students prefer these and think they help them learn anatomy. Future studies will investigate the impact of using these resources on students’ performance.

In recent years, the hours dedicated to teaching anatomy through dissection and didactic lectures to students of medicine and allied health professions, in the physical university environment, has reduced due to the advancement of technology and competition with teaching time from other disciplines (Papa & Vaccarezza, 2013;Wong et al., 2020). Additionally, there are concerns among medical and dental practitioners about poor anatomical knowledge among recent healthcare graduates (Durham et al., 2009;Fillmore et al., 2016;Hagan & Jaffe, 2018). Moreover, there appears to be a paucity of published research concerning the anatomical knowledge of occupational therapy (OT) and speech and language therapy (SLT) graduates. Anatomy is one of the fundamental subjects in healthcare curricula and is considered indispensable for safe and effective practice (Smith et al., 2016). It is not only healthcare professionals that notice the inadequate anatomical knowledge among graduates, students themselves also recognize this. Students in the early stages of their medical degree have described anatomy as boring and relate it to learning off reams of factual information which demands