Clinical Skills Acquisition: Rethinking Assessment Using a Virtual Haptic Simulator

Abstract

This study was the fourth study (Study 4) of four consecutive cohort studies ) of over 520 dental undergraduate first year students at King's College London as part of their 5-year undergraduate programme. The study reported in this paper is a 2-year longitudinal investigation of 140 first year students (and subsequent second year) who were being trained to develop their clinical dental skills. In this study students used both the traditional Phantom-head laboratory and a haptically simulated virtual reality systems (HapTEL) laboratory to develop their basic clinical skills. Pre-and post-psychometric tests were used to measure their spatial reasoning and manipulation skills. The test scores and traditional clinical examinations results showed significant improvement in their psychomotor skills especially in the area of spatial awareness within a 3-months period (one term) of pre-clinical training. The results showed that using psychometric tests can reveal specific skill development amongst students not identified by traditional assessment methods. This study complements the previous studies in showing the development of psychomotor skills by practising virtual reality simulators can be monitored and measured through stages of skill acquisition more accurately and objectively. These results confirmed the consistency of skill improvement through the three phases of skill acquisition although more analysis is needed of the specific types of tests which reliably measured these skill phases. The result of this research could therefore inform the development of formative and summative dental clinical skills' assessment to measure and monitor the student's psychomotor training with more regular and instant & Arash Shahriari-Rad arash.

Preparing dental students for independent practice: a scoping review of methods and trends in undergraduate clinical skills teaching in the UK and Ireland

“…This review found evidence of three dental schools who have integrated virtual reality/haptic simulators into their teaching environment (23% of dental schools). 23,24,25,26,27,28,29 As these dental schools pioneer the use of VR/AR, it is possible that others may follow.…”

Rethinking Assessment Concepts in Dental Education

“…This systematic process resulted in 24 articles being selected for inclusion in the review, seven had a low risk of bias [ 10 , 14 , 15 , 21 , 22 , 24 , 27 ], six had a high risk of bias [ 12 , 16 , 20 , 29 , 30 , 32 ], and eleven had an unclear risk of bias [ 13 , 17 – 19 , 23 , 25 , 26 , 28 , 31 , 33 , 34 ].…”

“…CDS along with the conventional typodont simulation systems provide enhanced spatial awareness and fine-motor coordination and enrich the depth and auditory perception. CDS can enhance psychomotor skill performance and improve the assessment accuracy of these skills [ 16 ]. Using psychometric tests can help demonstrate the growth of specific sets of skills amongst students that may not be recognized through traditional assessment methods.…”

Innovations in Teaching and Learning Strategies to Improve the Effectiveness of Using Haptic Simulators in Higher Education for Dental Students and Other Health Care Disciplines

“…The previous research evidence reviewed in this paper in Section 1, including the analysis of ten years of over 800 students results [9,16] have shown that the use of haptic simulators do enhance students' learning when used in an appropriate educational setting. The hapTEL system provides a dynamic real time feedback to the learner which has been shown by many previous studies into formative assessment that this enhances students' understanding [17,18].…”