Original Research
Formative feedback generation in a VR-based dental surgical skill training simulator

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2020.103659Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Existing VR dental skill training simulators do not fully support for formative feedback.

  • Our approach is to objectively assess surgical skills and generate formative feedback.

  • Performance improvements are observed in participants trained with formative feedback.

  • Our approach could increase the teaching effectiveness of existing training simulators.

Abstract

Fine motor skill is indispensable for a dentist. As in many other medical fields of study, the traditional surgical master-apprentice model is widely adopted in dental education. Recently, virtual reality (VR) simulators have been employed as supplementary components to the traditional skill-training curriculum, and numerous dental VR systems have been developed academically and commercially. However, the full promise of such systems has yet to be realized due to the lack of sufficient support for formative feedback. Without such a mechanism, evaluation still demands dedicated time of experts in scarce supply. To fill the gap of formative assessment using VR simulators in skill training in dentistry, we present a framework to objectively assess the surgical skill and generate formative feedback automatically. VR simulators enable collecting detailed data on relevant metrics throughout a procedure. Our approach to formative feedback is to correlate procedure metrics with the procedure outcome to identify the portions of a procedure that need to be improved. Specifically, for the errors in the outcome, the responsible portions of the procedure are identified by using the location of the error. Tutoring formative feedback is provided using the video modality. The effectiveness of the feedback system is evaluated with dental students using randomized controlled trials. The findings show the feedback mechanisms to be effective and to have the potential to be used as valuable supplemental training resources.

Keywords

Virtual reality
Dental skill training simulator
Formative feedback
Objective feedback
Video-based feedback

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