Testing Motor Learning Curves Among Dental Students

Motor learning up to reaching proficiency can be registered and displayed as a learning curve. Understanding the nature of the motor learning curves will allow proper planning of teaching. The aim of this study was to measure the rate of motor learning of novice dental students in preparing dental cavities. A total of 66 first-year students (21 males and 45 females) at a dental school in Israel participated in this 12-week study. In the first and last weeks, the students prepared 12 cavities in 45 minutes in a composite material plate, using a dental high-speed burr. In the ten weeks between tests, manual performance was measured by drilling two cavities, limited to 3.5 minutes per cavity. The results showed that improvement was significant (p<0.05) at two-week intervals in all cases except for the sixth and seventh weeks, when a significant increase was observed only after three weeks. The performance of the lowest performing students (those with grades in the lowest third of the class) remained low throughout the entire course. Further subdivision of the class into two groups showed that the upper half reached the minimum required performance in week 9, whereas the lower half achieved it only three weeks later. The authors concluded that the 12 week study was not sufficiently long for the learning curve to reach a plateau. Dental students present a variety of motor learning curves and different rates of proficiency acquisition, so understanding the nature of these curves, and the differences among students, may be useful in lesson planning to support the process of motor learning.