Comparison of Two Teaching Methods, Lecture, and Virtual Teaching, on the Motivation and Academic Progress of Dental Students

Effective education for learning in professional fields, especially dentistry, is one of the necessities of society, and considering the importance of oral and maxillofacial diseases in dentistry as well as the lack of information in the field of comparing modern teaching methods and traditional methods.

This study was conducted to compare the effect of two methods of face-to-face education, lecture, and virtual education, on the motivation and academic progress of 6th-semester dental students.

In this randomized intervention study, 36 students in the 6th semester of dentistry in Birjand were randomly divided into two intervention and control groups. In the control group, the face-to-face teaching method was used in lecture style, and in the second group, the online virtual teaching method was used. Before and after the intervention, the same written test of educational content was taken from both groups, and academic motivation was measured with the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) of Vallerand et al. The data were analyzed with SPSS software and using descriptive statistics, independent t-tests, and paired t-tests. The P-value was considered significant at the level of 0.05.

The average age of the participants in the face-to-face training group was 23.89 ± 2.826, and in the virtual group was 23.50 ± 1.855, which was not statistically significant (P = 0.629). There was no significant difference between the average scores of students’ motivation and academic progress between the two groups before (P > 0.05) and after the intervention (P > 0.05). Although there was an increase in students’ average scores of academic motivation and academic progress after the intervention between the two groups of face-to-face education and virtual education, there was no statistically significant (P > 0.05).

It seems that virtual teaching, like lecture teaching, can be effective in students’ academic progress and motivation and can be considered a complementary teaching method.