Impact of Digital Tooth Preparation Evaluation Technology on Preclinical Dental Students’ Technical and Self‐Evaluation Skills

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of digital tooth preparation imaging and evaluation technology on dental students' technical abilities, self-evaluation skills, and the assessment of their simulated clinical work. A total of 80 secondyear students at one U.S. dental school were assigned to one of three groups: control (n=40), E4D Compare (n=20), and Sirona prepCheck (n=20). Students in the control group were taught by traditional teaching methodologies, and the technology-assisted groups received both traditional training and supplementary feedback from the corresponding digital system. Three outcomes were measured: faculty technical score, self-evaluation score, and E4D Compare scores at 0.30 mm tolerance. Correlations were determined between the groups' scores from visual assessment and self-evaluation and between the visual assessment and digital scores. The results showed that the visual assessment and self-evaluation scores did not differ among groups (p>0.05). Overall, correlations between visual and digital assessment scores were modest though statistically signiicant (5% level of signiicance). These results suggest that the use of digital tooth preparation evaluation technology did not impact the students' prosthodontic technical and self-evaluation skills. Visual scores given by faculty and digital assessment scores correlated moderately in only two instances.

Effectiveness of technology-enhanced teaching and assessment methods of undergraduate preclinical dental skills: a systematic review of randomized controlled clinical trials

“…Nine studies (47.4%) took place in Europe [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], ve studies (26.3%) took place in North America [7,[27][28][29][30], three studies (15.8%) were conducted in Asia [31][32][33], one study (5.2%) was conducted in Oceania [34], and one study (5.2%) did not mention the country setting [35]. One study (5.2%) had a sample size of 9 [7], three studies (15.8%) had a sample size between 11 and 30 [22,28,34], 11 studies (57.9%) had a sample size between 31 and 50 [18-21, 23-26, 31, 33, 35], two studies (10.5%) had a sample size between 51 and 70 [29,32], and two studies (10.5%) had a sample size between 71 and 90 students [27,30].…”

“…One study (5.2%) had a sample size of 9 [7], three studies (15.8%) had a sample size between 11 and 30 [22,28,34], 11 studies (57.9%) had a sample size between 31 and 50 [18-21, 23-26, 31, 33, 35], two studies (10.5%) had a sample size between 51 and 70 [29,32], and two studies (10.5%) had a sample size between 71 and 90 students [27,30]. Seven studies (36.8%) assessed second year undergraduate dental students [7,21,22,27,29,30,33], four (21%) assessed rst year [23][24][25]28], four (21%) assessed fourth year [20,32,34,35], two (10.5%) assessed third year [18,26], one (5.2%) assessed fth year [31], and one (5.2%) assessed a mixture of fourth and fth year [19]. Most of these studies (57.9%) assessed the student's ability in operative dentistry [18, 20-26, 29, 30, 33].…”

“…In total, there were four main types of technology-assessments that were used in all the 19 studies. Ten studies (52.6%) used virtual reality [21-25, 28-31, 33], six studies (31.5%) used a digital scanner [7,20,26,27,32,34], two (10.5%) used augmented reality [18,19], and one (5.2%) used haptic technology [35].…”

“…One study had a low risk of bias [35], 5 had an unclear risk of bias [24,25,[32][33][34], and 13 had a high risk of bias [7,[18][19][20][21][22][23][26][27][28][29][30][31], ( Figure 2). A summary of the percentage of allocation of risk of bias grades in each domain can be seen in Figure 3.…”

“…Out of the total 19 studies, 17 had allocation concealment bias [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], and of these 15 also had another form of selection bias namely, random sequence generation [18][19][20][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Six studies had performance bias in terms of either blinding of the personnel or the participants involved [7,20,[27][28][29][30].…”