Assessment of the Knowledge and Attitudes of Dental School Faculty Members towards two Student Assessment Tools

 Assessment plays a great role in encouraging learning and evaluating whether the learning objectives have been achieved.

 This study aimed to assess the knowledge and attitudes of dental faculty members toward Patient Management Problem (PMP) and Multiple-Choice Question (MCQ) tests.

 In this descriptive-analytic cross-sectional study, a questionnaire was used to collect information from 54 faculty members of the dental school of Kerman University of Medical Sciences from 2019 to 2020. This study’s questionnaire consisted of two parts: the first part included demographic information, and the second included questions related to the faculty members' knowledge (10 questions) and attitudes (8 questions) towards MCQ and PMP tests. Cronbach’s alpha was considered to be 0.8. Content validity was assessed to determine the validity of the questionnaire. SPSS 20 was used to analyze the data, which included descriptive statistics such as percentage, mean, and standard deviation, as well as non-parametric tests such as the Kruskal-Wallis and linear regression tests.

 Fifty four dentistry faculty members returned the completed questionnaires in this study. Amongst them, 34(63%) were female, and 20(37%) were male. The mean scores of the knowledge and attitudes questionnaire toward the MCQ and PMP tests were 7.20 and 27.83, respectively. The Mean scores of the knowledge and attitudes had no significant relationship with age, gender, and teaching experience.

 Based on the results, it can be concluded that the dental faculty members had good knowledge about MCQs and PMPs structures and their strengths and weaknesses. There was also a good awareness of the shortcomings of the MCQ test in the assessment of clinical reasoning and the lack of transparency of this assessment tool.