title: A multimedia patient simulation for teaching and assessing endodontic diagnosis.
abstract: Teaching and assessing diagnostic skills are difficult due to relatively small numbers of total clinical experiences and a shortage of clinical faculty. Patient simulations could help teach and assess diagnosis by displaying a well-defined diagnostic task, then providing informative feedback and opportunities for repetition and correction of errors. This report describes the development and initial evaluation of SimEndo I, a multimedia patient simulation program that could be used for teaching or assessing endodontic diagnosis. Students interact with a graphical interface that has four pull-down menus and related submenus. In response to student requests, the program presents patient information. Scoring is based on diagnosis of each case by endodontists. Pilot testing with seventy-four junior dental students identified numerous needed improvements to the user interface program. A multi-school field test of the interface program using three patient cases addressed three research questions: 1) How did the field test students evaluate SimEndo I? Overall mean evaluation was 8.1 on a 0 to 10 scale; 2) How many cases are needed to generate a reproducible diagnostic proficiency score for an individual student using the Rimoldi scoring procedure? Mean diagnostic proficiency scores by case ranged from .27 to .40 on a 0 to 1 scale; five cases would produce a score with a 0.80 reliability coefficient; and 3) Did students accurately diagnose each case? Mean correct diagnosis scores by case ranged from .54 to .78 on a 0 to 1 scale. We conclude that multimedia patient simulations offer a promising alternative for teaching and assessing student diagnostic skills.
authors.affiliation: Department of Academic Informatics Services, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78229-3900, USA. Littlefield@uthscsa.edu
authors.forename: John H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Littlefield
authors.forename: Elaine L
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: Demps
authors.forename: Karl
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Keiser
authors.forename: Lipika
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chatterjee
authors.forename: Cheng H
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.forename: Kenneth M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Hargreaves
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction; D019992:Databases as Topic; D004497:Education, Dental; D004521:Educational Measurement; D004708:Endodontics / Q000193:education*; D005246:Feedback; D006801:Humans; D019212:Multimedia; D010865:Pilot Projects; D012985:Software Design; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods*; D014584:User-Computer Interface