Phone-based audience response system as an adjunct in orthodontic teaching of undergraduate dental students: a cross-over randomised controlled trial

Abstract

Background: The advent of electronic teaching facilities improved tutor-student communication. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of Phone-Based Audience Response System (PB-ARS), as an adjunctive and interactive model to traditional pedagogy, on the retention of information by undergraduate dental students and to explore the students’ perception and acceptance of PB-ARS. Methods: This cross-over clustered randomised control trial was conducted with 34 final year undergraduate dental students, who were allocated to one of two event groups (G1 and G2) using computer-generated randomisation. Both groups simultaneously attended two different traditional lectures a week apart (L 1 and L2). During L1, PB-ARS was used as an adjunct to conventional presentation to teach G1 participants (PB-ARS group). In contrast, G2’s participants acted as a control group (CG), and they were taught using the traditional presentation. In the second week (L2), the interventions were crossed. Participants from both groups completed pre- and post-lecture multiple-choice questions (MCQ) to assess short-term retention of information. They also filled post-lecture questionaries' to determine their perceptions of teaching delivery. Their performance in the final MCQ exam (10 weeks following L2) were used assess the long-term recall of the obtained knowledge. Results: 29 and 31 participants from the CG and PB-ARS group completed this trial, respectively. Although 87.5% of students in PB-ARS group showed an improvement in their post-lecture scores compared to 79.3% for CG, it was statistically insignificant. Similarly, the intervention showed an insignificant effect on the long-term retention of the knowledge.There was a mildly favourable attitude of students to the PB-ARS system; however, the difference in the overall rate of the level of satisfaction in both was statistically insignificant.Conclusion: PB-ARS system has a minimal insignificant effect on short- and long term retention of knowledge of the undergraduate dental students, though it was a slightly more preferred adjunct to conventional classroom teaching. Due to the limitation of this trial, a long-term randomised controlled trial with a larger sample size is recommended.