Electronic Voting in Dental Materials Education: The Impact on Students’ Attitudes and Exam Performance

Abstract

Dental materials is an integral part of any undergraduate dental curriculum and is most commonly taught in a traditional didactic, lecture-based format. It suffers from the ignominy of being viewed by many as a dry, factual subject with little to excite or engage the student. In this article, the author presents the experimental use of an electronic voting (eVoting) system in an undergraduate dental materials course. The practical and aspirational aspects of its application are described. The objective was to assess the student perception of the experiment and the impact on end-of-course examination results. The eVoting system proved overwhelmingly popular with the students with 95 percent in favor of its use at the beginning of the course and 91 percent at the end. There was, however, no statistically significant impact on the results of the examination at the end of the course, when compared to the previous year's cohort of students for whom eVoting was not used. eVoting encouraged student interaction and engagement and contributed to student satisfaction but was not seen to affect the outcome measurement (end-of-course examination result).

The Impact of an Audience Response System on a Summative Assessment, a Controlled Field Study

“…Our results are in line with previous results indicating that the main advantage of audience response systems would be more the motivation of students and the generation of a stimulating learning environment than the improvement of assessment grades (Barbour et al, 2008).…”

“…The sample size of about 154 students participating in this study was comparable to the number of participants in other studies which achieved statistically significant results (114 questionnaires in Guarascio et al, 2017; 142 students in Barbour et al, 2008;192 students in Datta et al, 2015). Due to the use of dummy coding, each student is both part of the intervention and of the control cohort.…”

“…Here, we conducted a controlled educational research study in a seminar setting which allowed a direct comparison between topics taught with an audience response system and topics without this additional interactive part. Furthermore, the dummy coding procedure allowed us to reach a considerable high number of study participants compared with other studies (Barbour et al, 2008;Datta et al, 2015;Mains et al, 2015;Guarascio et al, 2017).…”

“…It was therefore fair to assume that audience response systems should also impact the results of assessments. Previous studies on the impact of audience response systems on assessments showed contradictory results (Barbour et al, 2008;Mains et al, 2015;Datta et al, 2015). One needs to consider that it is difficult if not impossible to form appropriate control groups if the impact of audience response systems is assessed in plenary lectures.…”

“…Students positively assess their use (e.g. Barbour et al, 2008;Datta et al, 2015;Guarascio et al, 2017) and audience response systems were reported to increase the student's satisfaction with a certain lecture.…”