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Electronic Voting in Dental Materials Education: The Impact on Students’ Attitudes and Exam Performance
Author(s) -
Barbour Michele E.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of dental education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.53
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1930-7837
pISSN - 0022-0337
DOI - 10.1002/j.0022-0337.2008.72.9.tb04578.x
Subject(s) - dental education , medical education , curriculum , electronic voting , psychology , voting , perception , affect (linguistics) , course evaluation , mathematics education , higher education , pedagogy , medicine , political science , communication , neuroscience , politics , law
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).