Designing an educational software for teaching and evaluation of radiology course in dentistry

Background and purpose: Radiology course has different parts in dentistry curriculum in Iranian medical universities. The third part of this course involves the diagnosis of facial and jaw’s bone lesions. In this study an educational software was designed, by using Access Database Software, to teach this course to dentistry students and after one semester the efficacy of it was tested by examining the students’ opinion about it.Methods: In this study the radiology course part 3 was thought to the 32 students in 2 parts. In the first part (before mid-semester) the traditional method of teaching and in the second part (after the mid-semester exam) the designed software was used for teaching and evaluating the students. After each semester the opinion of the students about the course was examined by using a standard questionnaire. The students in the first and second part of the semester were considered as the control and case group respectively.Results: Most of the students (90.6%) believe that the software is useful in education and helps them to learn the subject. In addition, 84.4% of students believe that the soft ware can evaluate the clinical skills of students in detecting the radiological lesions and that the program can save their studying time. Overall, the students’ marks in case group were significantly higher than these in control group. The overall satisfaction of 78.1% of students about this program was good while 9.3% did not have a good feeling about it and 12.5% did not express any opinion.Conclusion: This study shows the importance of using computer for educational purposes especially in the courses with a huge amount of materials to be memorized by students. Computer science can help students in memorizing different signs and symptoms of many disorders. In addition it can help the teachers to evaluate the students at the end of the course.