TY  - JOUR
A1  - Seifert, Lukas
A1  - Socolan, Octavian
A1  - Sader, Robert Alexander
A1  - Rüsseler, Miriam
A1  - Sterz, Jasmina
T1  - Virtual patients versus small-group teaching in the training of oral and maxillofacial surgery: a randomized controlled trial
T2  - BMC medical education
N2  - Background: Computerized virtual patients (VP) have spread into many areas of healthcare delivery and medical education. They provide various advantages like flexibility in pace and space of learning, a high degree of teaching reproducibility and a cost effectiveness. However, the educational benefit of VP as an additive or also as an alternative to traditional teaching formats remains unclear. Moreover, there are no randomized-controlled studies that investigated the use of VP in a dental curriculum. Therefore, this study investigates VP as an alternative to lecturer-led small-group teaching in a curricular, randomized and controlled setting.
Methods: Randomized and controlled cohort study. Four VP cases were created according to previously published design principles and compared with lecturer-led small group teaching (SGT) within the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery clerkship for dental students at the Department for Cranio-, Oral and Maxillofacial Plastic Surgery, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. Clinical competence was measured prior (T0), directly (T1) and 6 weeks (T2) after the intervention using theoretical tests and a self-assessment questionnaire. Furthermore, VP design was evaluated using a validated toolkit.
Results: Fifty-seven students (VP = 32; SGT = 25) agreed to participate in the study. No competence differences were found at T0 (p = 0.56). The VP group outperformed (p < .0001) the SGT group at T1. At T2 there was no difference between both groups (p = 0.55). Both interventions led to a significant growth in self-assessed competence. The VP group felt better prepared to diagnose and treat real patients and regarded VP cases as a rewarding learning experience.
Conclusions: VP cases are an effective alternative to lecture-led SGT in terms of learning efficacy in the short and long-term as well as self-assessed competence growth and student satisfaction. Furthermore, integrating VP cases within a curricular Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Clerkship is feasible and leads to substantial growth of clinical competence in undergraduate dental students.
KW  - Oral and maxillofacial surgery
KW  - Education
KW  - Virtual patients
KW  - Surgical education
KW  - Dental education
KW  - Dental students
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/55254
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-552542
SN  - 1472-6920
N1  - © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
VL  - 19
IS  - 454
SP  - 1
EP  - 10
PB  - BioMed Central
CY  - London
ER  -